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PROGRESS 
AND POVERTY 



BY 



HENRY GEORGE 



The struggle that must either revivify 
or convulse in ruin, is near at hand, if it be 
not already begun. — Progress and Poverty. 



THE JOSEPH FELS FUND OF AMERICA 

CINCINNATI, OHIO 



The Single Tax 

We propose to abolish all taxes save 
one single tax levied on the value of 
land, irrespective of the value of the 
improvements in or on it. 

What we propose is not a tax on 
real estate, for real estate includes 
improvements. Nor is it a tax on 
land, for we would not tax all land, 
but only land having a value irre- 
spective of its improvements, and 
would tax that in proportion to that 

value. 

Our plan involves the imposition of 
no new tax, since we already tax land 
values in taxing real estate. To carry 
it out we have only to abolish all taxes 
save the tax on real estate, and to 
abolish all of that which now falls on 
buildings and improvements, leaving 
only that part of it which now falls on 
the value of the bare land, increasing 
that so as to take as nearly as may be 
the whole of economic rent, or what 
is sometimes styled the "unearned in- 
crement of land values." 

Henry George 



PROGRESS AND POVERTY 



PROGRESS AND POVERTY 



AN INQUIRY INTO THE CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL 

DEPRESSIONS AND OF INCREASE OF WANT 

WITH INCREASE OF WEALTH 



THE REMEDY 



BY 

HENRY GEORGE 

Author of "The Science of Political Economy," "Protection or Free Trade?" 

"Social Problems," "A Perplexed Philosopher," "The Condition of 

Labor," "The Land Question," "Property in Land," etc. 




THE JOSEPH FELS FUND OF AMERICA 

CINCINNATI, OHIO 



l^jO 






Entered according to act of Congress in the year 187& 

By Henry George 

in the office oi the Librarian of CongresSo 



GUft of 

******** GM * r * 

Nov. 6. »» 



TO THOSE WHO, 

SEEING THE VICE AND MISERY THAT SPRING FROM 

THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION 

OF WEALTH AND PRIVILEGE, 

FEEL THE POSSIBILITY OF A HIGHER SOCIAL STATE 

AND WOULD STRIVE FOR ITS ATTAINMENT 

San Francisco, March, 1879. 



Make for thyself a definition or description of 
the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see 
distinctly what kind of a thing it is, in its sub- 
stance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and 
tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the 
things of which it has been compounded, and into 
which it will be resolved. For nothing is so pro- 
ductive of elevation of mind as to be able to ex- 
amine methodically and truly every object which 
is presented to thee in life, and always to look at 
things so as to see at the same time what kind of 
universe this is, and what kind of use everything 
performs in it, and what value everything has 
with reference to the whole, and what with refer- 
ence to man, who is a citizen of the highest city, 
of which all other cities are like families ; what 
each thing is, and of what it is composed, and 
how long it is the nature of this thing to endure. 
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNI- 
VERSARY EDITION OF "PROGRESS 
AND POVERTY' ' 

Out of the open West came a young man of less than 
thirty to this great city of New York. He was small of 
stature and slight of build. His alma mater had been 
the forecastle and the printing-office. He was poor, un- 
heralded, unknown. He came from a small city rising at 
the western golden portals of the country to set up here, 
for a struggling little newspaper there, a telegraphic 
news bureau, despite the opposition of the combined 
powerful press and telegraph monopolies. The strug- 
gle was too unequal. The young man was overborne by 
the monopolies and his little paper crushed. 

This young man was Henry George and the time was 
1869. 

But though defeated, Henry George was not van- 
quished. Out of this struggle had come a thing that was 
to grow and grow until it should fill the minds and 
hearts of multitudes and be as " an army with banners. ' ' 

For in the intervals of rest from his newspaper strug- 
gle in this city the young correspondent had musingly 
walked the streets. As he walked he was filled with 
wonder at the manifestations of vast wealth. Here, as 
nowhere that he had dreamed of, were private fortunes 
that rivaled the riches of the fabled Monte Cristo. But 
here, also, side by side with the palaces of the princely 
rich, was to be seen a poverty and degradation, a want 
and shame, such as made the young man from the open 
West sick at heart. 

v 4 i 



Vlll r INTRODUCTION 

Why in a land so bountifully blest, with enough and 
more than enough for all, should there be such inequality 
of conditions? Such heaped wealth interlocked with 
such deep and debasing want? Why, amid such super- 
abundance, should strong men vainly look for work? 
Why should women faint with hunger, and little chil- 
dren spend the morning of life in the treadmill of toil ? 

Was this intended in the order of things? No, he 
could not believe it. And suddenly there came to him 
— there in daylight, in the city street— a burning 
thought, a call, a vision. Every nerve quivered. And 
he made a vow that he would never rest until he had 
found the cause of, and, if he could, the remedy for, this 
deepening poverty amid advancing wealth. 

Returning to San Francisco soon after his telegraphic 
news failure, and keeping his vow nurtured in his heart, 
Henry George perceived that land speculation locked up 
vast territories against labor. Everywhere he perceived 
an effort to ' l corner ' ' land ; an effort to get it and to 
hold it, not for use, but for a " rise." Everywhere he 
perceived that this caused all who washed to use it to 
compete with each other for it ; and he foresaw that as 
population grew the keener that competition would be- 
come. Those who had a monopoly of the land would 
practically own those who had to use the land. 

Filled with these ideas, Henry George in 1871 sat 
down and in the course of four months wrote a little 
book under title of ' ' Our Land and Land Policy. ' ' In 
that small volume of forty-eight pages he advocated the 
destruction of land monopoly by shifting all taxes from 
labor and the products of labor and concentrating them 
in one tax on the value of land, regardless of improve- 
ments. A thousand copies of this small book were 
printed, but the author quickly perceived that really to 
command attention, the work would have to be done 
more thoroughly. 

That more thorough work came something more than 
six years later. In August, 1877, the writing of "Prog- 



INTRODUCTION IX 

ress and Poverty" was begun. It was the oak that grew 
out of the acorn of ' * Our Land and Land Policy. ' ' The 
larger book became "an inquiry into industrial depres- 
sions and of increase of want with increase of wealth," 
and pointed out the remedy. 

The book was finished after a year and seven months 
of intense labor, and the undergoing of privations that 
caused the family to do without a parlor carpet, and 
which frequently forced the author to pawn his per- 
sonal effects. 

And when the last page was written, in the dead of 
night, when he was entirely alone, Henry George flung 
himself upon his knees and wept like a child. He had 
kept his vow. The rest was in the Master's hands. 

Then the manuscript was sent to New York to find a 
publisher. Some of the publishers there thought it 
visionary; some, revolutionary. Most of them thought 
it unsafe, and all thought that it would not sell, or at 
least sufficiently to repay the outlay. Works on po- 
litical economy even by men of renown were notori- 
ously not money-makers. What hope then for a work 
of this nature from an obscure man— unknown, and 
without prestige of any kind? At length, however, 
D. Appleton & Co. said they would publish it if the 
author would bear the main cost, that of making the 
plates. There was nothing else for it, and so in order 
that the plate-making should be done under his own di- 
rection Henry George had the type set in a friend's 
printing-office in San Francisco, the author of the book 
setting the first two stickfuls himself. 

Before the plates, made from this type, were shipped 
East, they were put upon a printing-press and an 
"Author's Proof Edition" of five hundred copies was 
struck off. One of these copies Henry George sent to 
his venerable father in Philadelphia, eighty-one years 
old. At the same time the son wrote : 

It is with deep feeling of gratitude to Our Father in Heaven that 
I send you a printed copy of this book. I am grateful that I have 



X INTRODUCTION 

been enabled to live to write it, and that you have been enabled to 
live to see it. It represents a great deal of work and a good deal of 
sacrifice, but now it is done. It will not be recognized at first — 
maybe not for some time — but it will ultimately be considered a 
great book, will be published in both hemispheres, and be translated 
into different languages. This I know, though neither of us may 
ever see it here. But the belief that I have expressed in this book — 
the belief that there is yet another life for us — makes that of little 
moment. 

The prophecy of recognition of the book's greatness 
was fulfilled very quickly. The Appletons in New York 
brought out the first regular market edition in January, 
1880, just twenty-five years ago. Certain of the San 
Francisco newspapers derided book and author as the 
1 'hobby" of "little Harry George," and predicted that 
the work would never be heard of. But the press else- 
where in the country and abroad, from the old "Thun- 
derer" in London down, and the great periodical pub- 
lications, headed by the "Edinburgh Review," hailed 
it as a remarkable book that could not be lightly brushed 
aside. In the United States and England it was put 
into cheap paper editions, and in that form outsold the 
most popular novels of the day. In both countries, too, 
it ran serially in the columns of newspapers. Into all 
the chief tongues of Europe it was translated, there 
being three translations into German. Probably no 
exact statement of the book's extent of publication can 
be made; but a conservative estimate is that, embracing 
all forms and languages, more than two million copies 
of "Progress and Poverty" have been printed to date; 
and that including with these the other books that have 
followed from Henry George's pen, and which might 
be called "The Progress and Poverty Literature," per- 
haps five million copies have been given to the world. 

Henry George, Jr. 
New York, 
January 24, 1905. 



PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 



The views herein set forth were in the main briefly stated in a 
pamphlet entitled " Our Land and Land Policy," published in San 
Francisco in 1871. I then intended, as soon as I could, to present 
them more fully, but the opportunity did not for a long time occur. 
In the meanwhile I became even more firmly convinced of their 
truth, and saw more completely and clearly their relations; and I 
also saw how many false ideas and erroneous habits of thought 
stood in the way of their recognition, and how necessary it was to go 
over the whole ground. 

This I have here tried to do, as thoroughly as space would permit. 
It has been necessary for me to clear away before I could build up, 
and to write at once for those who have made no previous study of 
such subjects, and for those who are familiar with economic reason- 
ings; and, so great is the scope of the argument that it has been 
impossible to treat with the fullness they deserve many of the ques- 
tions raised. What I have most endeavored to do is to establish 
general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their 
applications where this is needed. 

In certain respects this book will be best appreciated by those who 
have some knowledge of economic literature; but no previous read- 
ing is necessary to the understanding of the argument or the passing 
of judgment upon its conclusions. The facts upon which I have 
relied are not facts which can be verified only by a search through 
libraries. They are facts of common observation and common 
knowledge, which every reader can verify for himself, just as he can 
decide whether the reasoning from them is or is not valid. 

Beginning with a brief statement of facts which suggest this in- 
quiry, I proceed to examine the explanation currently given in the 
name of political economy of the reason why, in spite of the increase 
of productive power, wages tend to the minimum of a bare living. 
This examination shows that the current doctrine of wages is founded 
upon a misconception; that, in truth, wages are produced by the 
labor for which they are paid, and should, other things being equal, 
increase with the number of laborers. Here the inquiry meets a 



Xll PKEFACE. 

doctrine which is the foundation and center of most important 
economic theories, and which has powerfully influenced thought in 
all directions — the Malthusian doctrine, that population tends to 
increase faster than subsistence. Examination, however, shows that 
this doctrine has no real support either in fact or in analogy, and that 
when brought to a decisive test it is utterly disproved. 

Thus far the results of the inquiry, though extremely important, 
are mainly negative. They show that current theories do not satis- 
factorily explain the connection of poverty with material progress, 
but throw no light upon the problem itself, beyond showing that its 
solution must be sought in the laws which govern the distribution of 
wealth. It therefore becomes necessary to carry the inquiry into 
this field. A preliminary review shows that the three laws of dis- 
tribution must necessarily correlate with each other, which as laid 
down by the current political economy they fail to do, and an ex- 
amination of the terminology in use reveals the confusion of thought 
by which this discrepancy has been slurred over. Proceeding then 
to work out the laws of distribution, I first take up the law of rent. 
This, it is readily seen, is correctly apprehended by the current 
political economy. But it is also seen that the full scope of this law 
has not been appreciated, and that it involves as corollaries the laws 
of wages and interest — the cause which determines what part of the 
produce shall go to the land owner necessarily determining what 
part shall be left for labor and capital. Without resting here, I pro- 
ceed to an independent deduction of the laws of interest and wages. 
I have stopped to determine the real cause and justification of in- 
terest, and to point out a source of much misconception — the con- 
founding of what are really the profits of monopoly with the legiti- 
mate earnings of capital. Then returning to the main inquiry, 
investigation shows that interest must rise and fall with wages, and 
depends ultimately upon the same thing as rent — the margin of 
cultivation or point in production where rent begins. A similar but 
independent investigation of the law of wages yields similar har- 
monious results. Thus the three laws of distribution are brought 
into mutual support and harmony, and the fact that with material 
progress rent everywhere advances is seen to explain the fact that 
wages and interest do not advance. 

What causes this advance of rent is the next question that arises, 
and it necessitates an examination of the effect of material progress 
upon the distribution of wealth. Separating the factors of material 
progress into increase of population and improvements in the arts, it 
is first seen that increase in population tends constantly, not merely 



PREFACE. xiii 

by reducing the margin of cultivation, but by localizing the econ- 
omies and powers which come with increased population, to increase 
the proportion of the aggregate produce which is taken in rent, and 
to reduce that which goes as wages and interest. Then eliminating 
increase of population, it is seen that improvement in the methods 
and powers of production tends in the same direction, and, land being 
held as private property, would produce in a stationary population 
all the effects attributed by the Malthusian doctrine to pressure of 
population. And then a consideration of the effects of the continuous 
increase in land values which thus spring from material progress 
reveals in the speculative advance inevitably begotten when land is 
private property a derivative but most powerful cause of the increase 
of rent and the crowding down of wages. Deduction shows that 
this cause must necessarily produce periodical industrial depressions, 
and induction proves the conclusion; while from the analysis which 
has thus been made it is seen that the necessary result of material 
progress, land being private property, is, no matter what the in- 
crease in population, to force laborers to wages which give but a 
bare living. 

This identification of the cause that associates poverty with prog- 
ress points to the remedy, but it is to so radical a remedy that I have 
next deemed it necessary to inquire whether there is any other 
remedy. Beginning the investigation again from another starting 
point, I have passed in examination the measures and tendencies 
currently advocated or trusted in for the improvement of the condi- 
tion of the laboring masses. The result of this investigation is to 
prove the preceding one, as it shows that nothing short of making 
land common property can permanently relieve poverty and check 
the tendency of wages to the starvation point. 

The question of justice now naturally arises, and the inquiry 
passes into the field of ethics. An investigation of the nature and 
basis of property shows that there is a fundamental and irreconcil- 
able difference between property in things which are the product of 
labor and property in land; that the one has a natural basis and 
sanction while the other has none, and that the recognition of ex- 
clusive property in land is necessarily a denial of the right of prop- 
erty in the products of labor. Further investigation shows that 
private property in land always has, and always must, as develop- 
ment proceeds, lead to the enslavement of the laboring class; that 
land owners can make no just claim to compensation if society choose 
to resume its right; that so far from private property in iand being 
in accordance with the natural perceptions of men, the very reverse 



Xiy PREFACE. 

is true, and that in the United States we are already beginning to 
feel the effects of having admitted this erroneous and destructive 
principle. 

The inquiry then passes to the field of practical statesmanship. 
It is seen that private property in land, instead of being necessary to 
its improvement and use, stands in the way of improvement and use, 
and entails an enormous waste of productive forces; that the recog- 
nition of the common right to land involves no shock or dispossession, 
but is to be reached by the simple and easy method of abolishing 
ull taxation save that upon land values. And this an inquiry into 
the principles of taxation shows to be, in all respects, the best subject 
of taxation. 

A consideration of the effects of the change proposed then shows 
that it would enormously increase production; would secure justice 
in distribution; would benefit all classes; and would make possible 
an advance to a higher and nobler civilization. 

The inquiry now rises to a wider field, and recommences from 
another starting point. For not only do the hopes which have been 
raised come into collision with the widespread idea that social prog- 
ress is possible only by slow race improvement, but the conclusions 
we have arrived at assert certain laws which, if they are really nat- 
ural laws, must be manifest in universal history. As a final test, it 
therefore becomes necessary to work out the law of human progress, 
for certain great facts which force themselves on our attention, as 
soon as we begin to consider this subject, seem utterly inconsistent 
with what is now the current theory. This inquiry shows that dif- 
ferences in civilization are not due to differences in individuals, but 
rather to differences in social organization ; that progress, always 
kindled by association, always passes into retrogression as inequality 
is developed; and that even now, in modern civilization, the causes 
which have destroyed all previous civilizations are beginning to 
manifest themselves, and that mere political democracy is running 
its course toward anarchy and despotism. But it also identifies the 
law of social life with the great moral law of justice, and, proving 
previous conclusions, shows how retrogression may be prevented 
and a grander advance begun. This ends the inquiry. The final 
chapter will explain itself. 

The great importance of this inquiry will be obvious. If it has 
been carefully and logically pursued, its conclusions completely 
change the character of political economy, give it the coherence and 
certitude of a true science, and bring it into full sympathy with the 
aspirations of the masses of men, from which it ha6 long been 03- 



PREFACE. XV 

tranged. What I have done in this book, if I have correctly solved 
the great problem I have sought to investigate, is, to unite the truth 
perceived by the school of Smith and Ricardo to the truth perceived 
by the schools of Proudhon and Lasalle; to show that laissez faire 
(in its full true meaning) opens the way to a realization of the noble 
dreams of socialism; to identify social law with moral law, and to 
disprove ideas which in the minds of many cloud grand and elevat- 
ing perceptions. 

This work was written between August, 1877, and March, 1879, 
and the plates finished by September of that year. Since that time 
new illustrations have been given of the correctness of the views 
herein advanced, and the march of events — and especially that great 
movement which has begun in Great Britain in the Irish land agita- 
tion — shows still more clearly the pressing nature of the problem 
I have endeavored to solve. But there has been nothing in the 
criticisms the}^ have received to induce the change or modification 
of these views — in fact, I have yet to see an objection not answered 
in advance in the book itself. And except that some verbal errors 
have been corrected and a preface added, this edition is the same as 
previous ones. 

Henry George. 

New York, November, 1880. 



There must be refuge ! Men 
Perished in winter winds till one smote fire 
From flint stones coldly hiding what they held, 
The red spark treasured from the kindling sun ; 
They gorged on flesh like wolves, till one sowed corn, 
Which grew a weed, yet makes the life of man ; 
They mowed and babbled till some tongue struck speech, 
And patient fingers framed the lettered sound. 
What good gift have my brothers, but it came 
From search and strife and loving sacrifice ? 

Edwin Arnold. 

Never yet 
Share of Truth was vainly set 
In the world's wide fallow ; 
After hands shall sow the seed, 

After hands, from hill and mead, 
Reap the harvests yellow. 

Whittier. 



CONTENTS. 



Introductory. 

page 

The Problem c 3 

Book I.— Wages and Capital. 

Chapter I. —The current doctrine of wages— its insufficiency 17 

II.— The meaning of the terms .' 30 

IIL— Wages not drawn from capital, but produced by the labor 49 

IV.— The maintenance of laborers not drawn from capital 70 

V.— The real functions of capital 79 

Book II.— Population and Subsistence. 

Chapter I.— The Malthusian theory, its genesis and support 91 

II.— Inferences from facts 103 

IIL— Inferences from analogy 129 

IV.— Disproof of the Malthusian theory. 140 

Book III.— The Laws of Distribution. 
Chapter I.— The inquiry narrowed to the laws of distribution— necessary 

relation of these laws 153 

II. — Rent and the law of rent 165 

III.— Interest and the cause of interest 173 

IV.— Of spurious capital and of profits often mistaken for interest. . 189 

V.— The law of interest 195 

VI.— Wages and the law of wages 204 

VII.— Correlation and co-ordination of these laws 217 

VIII.— The statics of the problem thus explained 219 

Book IV.— Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution of Wealth. 

Chapter I.— The dynamics of the problem yet to seek 225 

II.— Effect of increase of population upon the distribution of wealth 228 
III.— Effect of improvements in the arts upon the distribution of 

wealth 242 

IV.— Effect of the expectation raised by material progress 253 

Book V. — The Problem Solved. 

Chapter I.— The primary cause of recurring paroxysms of industrial 

depression 261 

II.— The persistence of poverty amid advancing wealth. . . . , 280 



XV111 CONTENTS. 

Book VI.— The Remedy. 

Chapter I. —Insufficiency of remedies currently advocated 297 

II.— The true remedy 326 

Book VII.— Justice of the Remedy. 

Chapter I.— In justice of private property in land 331 

II.— Enslavement of laborers the ultimate result of private property 

in land 345 

III.— Claim of land owners to compensation 356 

IV.— Property in land historically considered 366 

V.— Property in land in the United States 383 

Book VIII.— Application of the Remedy. 

Chapter I.— Private property in land inconsistent with the best use of land. 395 

II.— How equal rights to the land may be asserted and secured 401 

III.— The proposition tried by the canons of taxation 406 

IV.— Indorsements and objections 420 

Book IX.— Effects of the Remedy. 

Chapter I.— Of the effect upon the production of wealth 431 

II.— Of the effect upon distribution and thence upon production 438 

III.— Of the effect upon individuals and classes 445 

IV.— Of the changes that would be wrought in social organization 

and social life 452 

Book X.— The Law of Human Progress. 

Chapter I.— The current theory of human progress— its insufficiency 473 

II.— Differences in civilization— to what due 487 

III.— The law of human progress 503 

IV.— How modern civilization may decline 524 

V.— The central truth . 541 

Conclusion. 
The problem of individual life .... e .. ... 553 



INTRODUCTORY. 



THE PEOBLEM. 



Ye build ! ye build ! but ye enter not in, 

Like the tribes whom the desert devoured in their sin; 

From the land of promise ye fade and die, 

Ere its verdure gleams forth on your wearied eye. 

— Mrs. Sigourney 



INTRODUCTORY. 



THE PEOBLEM. 

The present century has been marked by a prodigious 
increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of 
steam and electricity, the introduction of improved proc- 
esses and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision 
and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilita- 
tion of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effect- 
iveness of labor. 

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural 
to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inven- 
tions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of 
the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of 
producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the 
past. Could a man of the last century — a Franklin or a 
Priestley — have seen, in a vision of the future, the 
steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the rail- 
road train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the 
scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have 
heard the throb of the engines that in obedience to 
human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, 
exert a power greater than that of all the men and all 
the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he 
have seen the forest tree transformed into finished 
lumber — into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, 
with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great work- 
shops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case 
with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could have 



4 INTRODUCTORY. 

put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a 
girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stal- 
wart weavers could have turned it out with their hand- 
looms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mam- 
moth shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery 
making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting through 
the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; 
could he have realized the enormous saving of labor 
resulting from improved facilities of exchange and com- 
munication — sheep killed in Australia eaten fresh in 
England, and the order given by the London banker in 
the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning 
of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred 
thousand improvements which these only suggest, what 
would he have inferred as to the social condition of man- 
kind? 

It would not have seemed like an inference; further 
than the vision went it would have seemed as though he 
saw; and his heart would have leaped and his nerves 
would have thrilled, as one who from a height beholds 
just ahead of the thirst-stricken caravan the living gleam 
of rustling woods and the glint of laughing waters. 
Plainly, in the sight of the imagination, he would have 
beheld these new forces elevating society from its very 
foundations, lifting the very poorest above the possibility 
of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the 
material needs of life; he would have seen these slaves of 
the lamp of knowledge taking on themselves the tradi- 
tional curse, these muscles of iron and sinews of steel 
making the poorest laborer's life a holiday, in which 
every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to 
grow. 

And out of these bounteous material conditions he 
would have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral 
conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind 
have always dreamedo Youth no longer stunted and 



THE PROBLEM. 5 

starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the child at 
play with the tiger; the man with the muck-rake drink- 
ing in the glory of the stars: Foul things fled, fierce 
things tame; discord turned to harmony! For how could 
there be greed where all had enough? How could the 
vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring 
from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where pov- 
erty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were 
freemen; who oppress where all were peers? 

More or less vague or clear, these have been the hopes, 
these the dreams born of the improvements which give 
this wonderful century its preeminence. They have sunk 
so deeply into the popular mind as radically to change 
the currents of thought, to recast creeds and displace the 
most fundamental conceptions. The haunting visions of 
higher possibilities have not merely gathered splendor 
and vividness, but their direction has changed — instead 
of seeing behind the faint tinges of an expiring sunset, 
all the glory of the daybreak has decked the skies before. 

It is true that disappointment has followed disappoint- 
ment, and that discovery upon discovery, and invention 
after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those 
who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor* 
But there have been so many things to which it seemed 
this failure could be laid, that up to our time the new 
faith has hardly weakened. We have better appreciated 
the difficulties to be overcome; but not the less trusted 
that the tendency of the times was to overcome them. 

Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts 
which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the 
civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; 
of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital 
massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among busi- 
ness men; of want and suffering and anxiety among thp 
working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the 
keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men 



6 INTRODUCTORY. 

are involved in the words "hard times," afflict the world 
to-day. This state of things, common to communities 
differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, 
in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population 
and in social organization, can hardly be accounted for 
by local causes. There is distress where large standing 
armies are maintained, but there is also distress where 
the standing armies are nominal; there is distress where 
protective tariffs stupidly and wastefully hamper trade, 
but there is also distress where trade is nearly free; there 
is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but 
there- is also distress where political power is wholly in 
the hands of the people; in countries where paper is 
money, and in countries where gold and silver are the 
only currency. Evidently, beneath all such things as 
these, we must infer a common cause. 

That there is a common cause, and that it is either 
what we call material progress or something closely con- 
nected with material progress, becomes more than an 
inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class 
together and speak of as industrial depression are but 
intensifications of phenomena which always accompany 
material progress, and which show themselves more 
clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where 
the conditions to which material progress everywhere 
tends are most fully realized — that is to say, where popu- 
lation is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of 
production and exchange most highly developed — we find 
the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, 
and the most of enforced idleness. 

It is to the newer countries — that is, to the countries 
where material progress is yet in its earlier stages — that 
laborers emigrate in search of higher wages, and capital 
flows in search of higher interest. It is in the older 
countries — that is to say, the countries where material 
progress has reached later stages — that widespread desti- 



THE PROBLEM. 7 

tution is found in the midst of the greatest abundance. 
Go into one of the new communities where Anglo-Saxon 
vigor is just beginning the race of progress; where the 
machinery of production and exchange is yet rude and 
inefficient; where the increment of wealth is not yet 
great enough to enable any class to live in ease and 
luxury; where the best house is but a cabin of logs or a 
cloth and paper shanty, and the richest man is forced to 
daily work — and though you will find an absence of 
wealth and all its concomitants, you will find no beggars. 
There is no luxury, but there is no destitution. No one 
makes an easy living, nor a very good living; but every 
one can make a living, and no one able and willing to 
work is oppressed by the fear of want. 

But just as such a community realizes the conditions 
which all civilized communities are striving for, and ad- 
vances in the scale of material progress — just as closer 
settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest 
of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving ma- 
chinery, make possible greater economies in production 
and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not 
merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population 
r— so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an 
infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard 
to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes with the loco- 
motive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the 
marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, 
.rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon 
streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed 
policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the 
shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gather- 
ing the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom 
Macaulay prophesied. 

This fact — the great fact that poverty and all its con- 
comitants show themselves in communities just as they 
develop into the conditions toward which material prog- 



8 INTRODUCTORY. 

ress tends — proves that the social difficulties existing 
wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do 
not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way 
or another, engendered by progress itself. 

And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last 
becoming evident that the enormous increase in produc- 
tive power which has marked the present century and is 
still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency 
to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those 
compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf between 
Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence 
more intense. The march of invention has clothed 
mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest 
imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories 
where labor-saving machinery has reached its most won- 
derful development, little children are at work; wherever 
the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large 
classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of 
recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, 
men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry 
breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship 
of wealth, shows the force of the fear of want. The 
promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits 
of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to 
apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch. 

It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and 
that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has 
been raised; but these gains are not general. In them 
the lowest class do not share.* I do not mean that the 

* It is true that the poorest may now in certain ways enjoy what 
the richest a century ago could not have commanded, but this does 
not show improvement of condition so long as the ability to obtain 
the necessaries of life is not increased. The beggar in a great city 
may enjoy many things from which the backwoods farmer is de- 
barred, but that does not prove the condition of the city beggar 
better than that of the independent farmer. 



THE PROBLEM. 9 

condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything 
been improved; but that there is nowhere any improve- 
ment which can be credited to increased productive power. 
I mean that the tendency of what we call material prog- 
ress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest 
class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. 
Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition 
of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their 
nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric 
from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and be- 
lieved, but strike it at a point intermediate between top 
and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were 
being forced, not underneath society, but through soci- 
ety. Those who are above the point of separation are 
elevated, but those who are below are crushed down. 

This depressing effect is not generally realized, for it 
is not apparent where there has long existed a class just 
able to live. Where the lowest class barely lives, as has 
been the case for a long time in many parts of Europe, 
it is impossible for it to get any lower, for the next low- 
est step is out of existence, and no tendency to further 
depression can readily show itself. But in the progress , 
of new settlements to the conditions of older communi- 
ties it may clearly be seen that material progress does not 
merely fail to relieve poverty — it actually produces it. 
In the United States it is clear that squalor and misery, 
and the vices and crimes that spring from them, every- 
where increase as the village grows to the city, and the 
march of development brings the advantages of the im- 
proved methods of production and exchange. It is in 
the older and richer sections of the Union that pauperism 
and distress among the working classes are becoming 
most painfully apparent. If there is less deep poverty in 
San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San 
Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities 
are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point 



10 INTRODUCTORY. 

where New York now is, who can doubt that there will 
also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets? 

This association of poverty with progress is the great 
enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which 
spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that 
perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and 
philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it 
come the clouds that overhang the future of the most 
progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle 
which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and 
which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all 
the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes 
but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and 
make sharper the contrast between the House of Have 
and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot 
be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower 
leans from its foundations, and every new story but 
hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who 
must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them 
restive; to base on a state of most glaring social in- 
equality political institutions under which men are 
theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex. 

All-important as this question is, pressing itself from 
every quarter painfully upon attention, it has not yet re- 
ceived a solution which accounts for all the facts and 
points to any clear and simple remedy. This is shown 
by the widely varying attempts to account for the pre- 
vailing depression. They exhibit not merely a diver- 
gence between vulgar notions and scientific theories, but 
also show that the concurrence which should exist be- 
tween those who avow the same general theories breaks 
up upon practical questions into an anarchy of opinion. 
Upon high economic authority we have been told that 
the prevailing depression is due to over-consumption; 
upon equally high authority, that it is due to over-pro- 
duction; while the wastes of war, the extension of rail- 



THE PROBLEM. 11 

roads, the attempts of workmen to keep up wages, the 
demonetization of silver, the issues of paper money, the 
increase of labor-saving machinery, the opening of 
shorter avenues to trade, etc., are separately pointed 
out as the cause, by writers of reputation. 

And while professors thus disagree, the ideas that 
there is a necessary conflict between capital and labor, 
that machinery is an evil, that competition must be re- 
strained and interest abolished, that wealth may be 
created by the issue of money, that it is the duty of gov- 
ernment to furnish capital or to furnish work, are 
rapidly making way among the great body of the people, 
who keenly feel a hurt and are sharply conscious of a 
wrong. Such ideas, which bring great masses of men, 
the repositories of ultimate political power, under the 
leadership of charlatans and demagogues, are fraught 
with danger; but they cannot be successfully combated 
until political economy shall give some answer to the 
great question which shall be consistent with all her 
teachings, and which shall commend itself to the per- 
ceptions of the great masses of men. 

It must be within the province of political economy to 
give such an answer. For political economy is not a set 
of dogmas. It is the explanation of a certain set of 
facts. It is the science which, in the sequence of certain 
phenomena, seeks to trace mutual relations and to iden- 
tify cause and effect, just as the physical sciences seek to 
do in other sets of phenomena. It lays its foundations 
upon firm ground. The premises from which it makes 
its deductions are truths which have the highest sanc- 
tion; axioms which we all recognize; upon which we 
safely base the reasoning and actions of every-day life, 
and which may be reduced to the metaphysical expres- 
sion of the physical law that motion seeks the line of 
least resistance — viz., that men seek to gratify their de- 
sires with the least exertion. Proceeding from a basis 



12 INTRODUCTORY. 

thus assured, its processes, whibh consist simply in 
identification and separation, have the same certainty. 
In this sense it is as exact a science as geometry, which, 
from similar truths relative to space, obtains its conclu- 
sions by similar means, and its conclusions when valid 
should be as self-apparent. And although in the domain 
of political economy we cannot test our theories by arti- 
ficially produced combinations or conditions, as may be 
done in some of the other sciences, yet we can apply 
tests no less conclusive, by comparing societies in which 
different conditions exist, or by, in imagination, separat- 
ing, combining, adding or eliminating forces or factors 
of known direction. 

I propose in the following pages to attempt to solve by 
the methods of political economy the great problem I 
have outlined. I propose to seek the law which associ- 
ates poverty with progress, and increases want with 
advancing wealth; and I believe that in the explanation 
of this paradox we shall find the explanation of those 
recurring seasons of industrial and commercial paralysis? 
which, viewed independently of their relations to more 
general phenomena, seem so inexplicable. Properly 
commenced and carefully pursued, such an investigation 
must yield a conclusion that will stand every test, and as 
truth, will correlate with all other truth. For in the 
sequence cf phenomena there is no accident. Every 
effect has a cause, and every fact implies a preceding 
fact. 

Tha', political economy, as at present taught, does not 
explain the persistence of poverty amid advancing wealth 
in a manner which accords with the deep-seated percep- 
tions of men; that the unquestionable truths which it 
does teach are unrelated and disjointed; that it has failed 
to make the progress in popular thought that truth, 
even when unpleasant, must make; that, on the con- 
trary, after a century of cultivation, during which it has 



THE PROBLEM. 13 

engrossed the attention of some of the most subtle and 
powerful intellects, it should be spurned by the statsman, 
scouted by the masses, and relegated in the opinion of 
many educated and thinking men to the rank of a 
pseudo-science in which nothing is fixed or can be fixed — 
must, it seems to me, be due not to any inability of the 
science when properly pursued, but to some false step 
in its premises, or overlooked factor in its estimates. 
And as such mistakes are generally concealed by the re- 
spect paid to authority, I propose in this inquiry to take 
nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories 
to the test of first principles, and should they not stand 
the test, freshly to interrogate facts in the endeavor to 
discover their law. 

I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no con- 
clusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon 
us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very 
heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little 
children moan. But what that law may prove to be is 
not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run 
counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they chal- 
lenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and 
natural, let us not turn back. 



BOOK I. 

WAGES AND CAPITAL. 



CHAPTER I. — THE CURRENT DOCTRINE — ITS INSCF- 

FICIENCY. 
CHAPTER II. — THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 
CHAPTER III. — WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL, B^T 

PRODUCED BY THE LABOR. 
CHAPTER IV. — THE MAINTENANCE OF LABORERS NOT 

DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 
CHAPTER V. — THE REAL FUNCTIONS OF CAPITALo 



He that is to follow philosophy must be a freeman in mind. 

— Ptolemy, 



CHAPTEE L 

THE CURRENT DOCTRINE OF WAGES — ITS INSUFFICIENCY, 

Keducing to its most compact form the problem we 
have set out to investigate, let us examine, step by step, 
the explanation which political economy, as now accepted 
by the best authority, gives of it. 

The cause which produces poverty in the midst of ad- 
vancing wealth is evidently the cause which exhibits it- 
self in the tendency, everywhere recognized, of wages to 
a minimum. Let us, therefore, put our inquiry into this 
compact form: 

Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages 
tend to a minimum which will give but a tare living ? 

The answer of the current political economy is, that 
wages are fixed by the ratio between the number of 
laborers and the amount of capital devoted to the em- 
ployment of labor, and constantly tend to the lowest 
amount on which laborers will consent to live and repro- 
duce, because the increase in the number of laborers 
tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in 
capital. The increase of the divisor being thus held in 
check only by the possibilities of the quotient, the divi- 
dend may be increased to infinity without greater result. 

In current thought this doctrine holds all but undis- 
puted sway. It bears the indorsement of the very high- 
est names among the cultivators of political economy, 
and though there have been attacks upon it, they are 



18 , WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

generally more formal than reaL* It is assumed by 
Buckle as the basis of his generalizations of universal 
history. It is taught in all, or nearly all, the great Eng- 
lish and American universities, and is laid down in text- 
books which aim at leading the masses to reason correctly 
upon practical affairs, while it seems to harmonize with 
the new philosophy, which, having in a few years all but 
conquered the scientific world, is now rapidly permeating 
the general mind. 

Thus entrenched in the upper regions of thought, it is 
in cruder form even more firmly rooted in what may be 
styled the lowers What gives to the fallacies of protec- 
tion such a tenacious hold, in spite of their evident in- 
consistencies and absurdities, is the idea that the sum to 
be distributed in wages is in each community a fixed one, 
which the competition of "foreign labor" must still 
further subdivide. The same idea underlies most of the 
theories which aim at the abolition of interest and the 
restriction of competition, as the means whereby the 
share of the laborer in the general wealth can be in- 
creased; and it crops out in every direction among those 
who are not thoughtful enough to have any theories, as 
may be seen in the columns of newspapers and the 
debates of legislative bodies. 

* This seems to me true of Mr. Thornton's objections, for while 
he denies the existence of a predetermined wage fund, consisting of 
a portion of capital set apart for the purchase of labor, he yet holds 
(which is the essential thing) that wages are drawn from capital, 
and that increase or decrease of capital is increase or decrease of the 
fund available for the payment of wages. The most vital attack 
upon the wage fund doctrine of which I know is that of Professor 
Francis A. Walker (The Wages Question: New York, 1876), yet he 
admits that wages are in large part advanced from capital — which, 
so far as it goes, is all that the stanchest supporter of the wage 
fund theory could claim — while he fully accepts the Malthusian 
theory. Thus his practical conclusions in nowise differ from those 
reached by expounders of the current theory. 



Chap. 1. THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 19 

And yet, widely accepted and deeply rooted as it is, it 
seems to me that this theory does not tally with obvious 
facts. For, if wages depend upon the ratio between the 
amount of labor seeking employment and the amount of 
capital devoted to its employment, the relative scarcity 
or abundance of one factor must mean the relative 
abundance or scarcity of the other. Thus, capital must 
be relatively abundant where wages are high, and rela- 
tively scarce where wages are low. Now, as the capital 
used in paying w 7 ages must largely consist of the capital 
constantly seeking investment, the current rate of inter- 
est must be the measure of its relative abundance or scar- 
city. So, if it be true that wages depend upon the ratio 
between the amount of labor seeking employment and 
the capital devoted to its employment, then high wages, 
the mark of the relative scarcity of labor, must be ac- 
companied by low interest, the mark of the relative 
abundance of capital, and reversely, low wages must be 
accompanied by high interest. 

This is not the fact, but the contrary. Eliminating 
from interest the element of insurance, and regarding 
only interest proper, or the return for the use of capital, 
is it not a general truth that interest is high where and 
when wages are high, and low where and when wages are 
low? Both wages and interest have been higher in the 
United States than in England, in the Pacific than in 
the Atlantic States. Is it not a notorious fact that where 
labor flows for higher wages, capital also flows for higher 
interest? Is it not true that wherever there has been a 
general rise or fall in wages there has been at the same 
time a similar rise or fall in interest? In California, for 
instance, when wages were higher than anywhere else in 
the world, so also was interest higher. Wages and inter- 
est have in California gone down together. When com- 
mon wages were $5 a day, the ordinary bank rate of in- 
terest was twenty-four per cent, per annum. Now that 



20 , WAGES AND CAPITAL, Book I 

common wages are $2 or $2.50 a day, the ordinary bank 
rate is from ten to twelve per cent. 

Now, this broad, general fact, that wages are higher in 
new countries, where capital is relatively scarce, than in 
old countries, where capital is relatively abundant, is too 
glaring to be ignored. And although very lightly 
touched upon, it is noticed by the expounders of the cur 
rent political economy. The manner in which it is 
noticed proves what I say, that it is utterly inconsistent 
with the accepted theory of wages. For in explaining it 
such writers as Mill, Fawcett, and Price virtually give up 
the theory of wages upon which, in the same treatises, 
they formally insist. Though they declare that wages 
are fixed by the ratio between capital and laborers, they 
explain the higher wages and interest of new countries 
by the greater relative production of wealth. I shall 
hereafter show that this is not the fact, but that, on the 
contrary, the production of wealth is relatively larger in 
old and densely populated countries than in new and 
sparsely populated countries. But at present I merely 
wish to point out the inconsistency. For to say that the 
higher wages of new countries are due to greater propor- 
tionate production, is clearly to make the ratio with pro- 
duction, and not the ratio with capital, the determinator 
of wages. 

Though this inconsistency does not seem to have been 
perceived by the class of writers to whom I refer, it has 
been noticed by one of the most logical of the expounders 
of the current political economy. Professor Cairnes* 
endeavors in a very ingenious way to reconcile the fact 
with the theory, by assuming that in new countries, 
where industry is generally directed to the production of 
food and what in manufactures is called raw material, a 

* Some Leading Principles of Political Economy Newly Ex- 
pounded, Chapter 1, Part 2. 



Chap. 1. THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 21 

much larger proportion of the capital used in production 
is devoted to the payment of wages than in older coun- 
tries where a greater part must be expended in machinery 
and material, and thus, in the new country, though cap- 
ital is scarcer, and interest is higher, the amount deter- 
mined to the payment of wages is really larger, and 
wages are also higher. For instance, of $100,000 devoted 
in an old country to manufactures, 880,000 would prob- 
ably be expended for buildings, machinery and the pur- 
chase of materials, leaving but $20,000 to be paid out in 
wages; whereas in a new country, of $30,000 devoted to 
agriciilture, etc., not more than $5,000 would be required 
for tools, etc., leaving $25,000 to be distributed in wages. 
In this way it is explained that the wage fund may be 
comparatively large where capital is comparatively scarce, 
and high wages and high interest accompany each other. 
In what follows I think I shall be able to show that 
this explanation is based upon a total misapprehension 
of the relations of labor to capital — a fundamental error 
as to the fund from which wages are drawn; but at pres- 
ent it is necessary only to point out that the connection 
in the fluctuation of wages and interest in the same 
countries and in the same branches of industry cannot 
thus be explained. In those alternations known as "good 
times" and "hard times" a brisk demand for labor and 
good wages is always accompanied by a brisk demand for 
capital and stiff rates of interest. While, when laborers 
cannot find employment and wages droop, there is always 
an accumulation of capital seeking investment at low 
rates.* The present depression has been no less marked 
by want of employment and distress among the working 
classes than by the accumulation of unemployed capital 

in all the great centers, and by nominal rates of interest 

• - < 

* Times of commercial panic are marked by high rates of dis- 
count, but this is evidently not a high rate of interest, properly s» 
called, but a high rate of insurance against risk. 



22 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Boole I 

on undoubted security. Thus, under conditions which 
admit of no explanation consistent with the current 
theory, do we find high interest coinciding with high 
wages, and low interest with low wages — capital seemingly 
scarce when labor is scarce, and abundant when labor is 
abundant. 

All these well known facts, which coincide with each 
other, point to a relation between wages and interest, 
but it is to a relation of conjunction, not of opposition. 
Evidently they are utterly inconsistent with the theory 
that wages are determined by the ratio between labor and 
capital, or any part of capital. 

How, then, it will be asked, could such a theory arise? 
How is it that it has been accepted by a succession of 
economists, from the time of Adam Smith to the present 
day? 

If we examine the reasoning by which in current 
treatises this theory of wages is supported, we see at once 
that it is not an induction from observed facts, but a de- 
duction from a previously assumed theory — viz., that 
wages are drawn from capital. It being assumed that 
capital is the source of wages, it necessarily follows that 
the gross amount of wages must be limited by the 
amount of capital devoted to the employment of labor, 
and hence that the amount individual laborers can re- 
ceive must be determined by the ratio between their 
number and the amount of capital existing for their rec- 
ompense.* This reasoning is valid, but the conclusion, 

* For instance McCulloch (Note VI to Wealth of Nations) says: 
''That portion of the capital or wealth of a country which the em 
ployers of labor intend to or are willing to pay out in the purchase 
of labor, may be much larger at one time than another. But what- 
ever may be its absolute magnitude, it obviously forms the only 
source from which any portion of the wages of labor can be derived. 
No other fund is in existence from which the laborer, as such, can 
draw a single shilling. And hence it follows that the average rate 



Chap. L THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 23 

as we have seen, does not correspond with the facts. 
The fault, therefore, must be in the premises. Let us 
see. 

I am aware that the theorem that wages are drawn 
from capital is one of the most fundamental and appar- 
ently best settled of current political economy, and that 
it has been accepted as axiomatic by all the great think- 
ers who have devoted their powers to the elucidation of 
the science. Nevertheless, I think it can be demon- 
strated to be a fundamental error — the fruitful parent of 
a long series of errors, which vitiate most important prac- 
tical conclusions. This demonstration I am about to 
attempt. It is necessary that it should be clear and con- 
clusive, for a doctrine upon which so much important 
reasoning is based, which is supported by such a weight 
of authority, which is so plausible in itself, and is so lia- 
ble to recur in different forms, cannot be safely brushed 
aside in a paragraph. 

The proposition I shall endeavor to prove, is: 

That wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in 
reality drawn from the product of the labor for which 
they are paid.* 

Now, inasmuch as the current theory that wages are 
drawn from capital also holds that capital is reimbursed 
from production, this at first glance may seem a distinc- 
tion without a difference — a mere change in terminology, 

of wages, or the share of the national capital appropriated to the 
employment of labor falling, at an average, to each laborer, must 
entirely depend on its amount as compared with the number of 
those amongst whom it has to be divided." Similar citations might 
be made from all the standard economists. 

* We are speaking of labor expended in production, to which it is 
best for the sake of simplicity to confine the inquiry. Any question 
which may arise in the reader's mind as to wages for unproductive 
services had best therefore be deferred. 



24 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

to discuss which would be but to add to those unprofit- 
able disputes that render so much that has been written 
upon politico-economic subjects as barren and worthless 
as the controversies of the various learned societies about 
the true reading of the inscription on the stone that Mr. 
Pickwick found. But that it is much more khan a 
formal distinction will be apparent when it is considered 
that upon the difference between the two propositions 
are built up all the current theories as to the relations of 
capital and labor; that from it are deduced doctrines 
that, themselves regarded as axiomatic, bound, direct, 
and govern the ablest minds in the discussion of the most 
momentous questions. For, upon the assumption that 
wages are drawn directly from capital, and not from the 
product of the labor, is based, not only the doctrine that 
wages depend upon the ratio between capital and labor, 
but the doctrine that industry is limited by capital — that 
capital must be accumulated before labor is employed, 
and labor cannot be employed except as capital is accu- 
mulated; the doctrine that every increase of capital gives 
or is capable of giving additional employment to indus- 
try; the doctrine that the conversion of circulating cay 
ital into fixed capital lessens the fund applicable to th ■ 
maintenance of labor; the doctrine that more laborers 
can be employed at low than at high wages; the doctrine 
that capital applied to agriculture will maintain more 
laborers than if applied to manufactures ; the doctrine 
that profits are high or low as wages are low or high, or 
that they depend upon the cost of the subsistence of 
laborers; together with such paradoxes as that a demand 
for commodities is not a demand for labor, or that cer- 
tain commodities may be increased in cost by a reduction 
in wages or diminished in cost by an increase in wages. 

In short, all the teachings of the current political 
economy, in the widest and most important part of its 
domain, are based more or less directly upon the assump- 



Chap. L THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 25 

tion that labor is maintained and paid out of existing 
capital before the product which constitutes the ultimate 
object is secured. If it be shown that this is an error, 
and that on the contrary the maintenance and payment 
of labor do not even temporarily trench on capital, but 
are directly drawn from the product of the labor, then all 
this vast superstructure is left without support and must 
fall. And so likewise must fall the vulgar theories which 
also have their base in the belief that the sum to be dis- 
tributed in wages is a fixed one, the individual shares in 
which must necessarily be decreased by an increase in 
the number of laborers. 

The difference between the current theory and the one 
I advance is, in fact, similar to that between the mercan- 
tile theory of international exchanges and that with 
which Adam Smith supplanted it. Between the theory 
that commerce is the exchange of commodities for 
money, and the theory that it is the exchange of commod- 
ities for commodities, there may seem no real difference 
when it is remembered that the adherents of the mercan- 
tile theory did not assume that money had any other use 
than as it could be exchanged for commodities. Yet, in 
the practical application of these two theories, there 
arises all the difference between rigid governmental pro- 
tection and free trade. 

If I have said enough to show the reader the ultimate 
importance of the reasoning through which I am about 
to ask him to follow me, it will not be necessary to 
apologize in advance either for simplicity or prolixity. 
In arraigning a doctrine of such importance — a doctrine 
supported by such a weight of authority, it is necessary 
to be both clear and thorough. 

Were it not for this I should be tempted to dismiss 
with a sentence the assumption that wages are drawn 
from capital. For all the vast superstructure which the 
current political economy builds upon this doctrine is 



26 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

in truth based upon a foundation which has been merely- 
taken for granted, without the slightest attempt to dis- 
tinguish the apparent from the real. Because wages are 
generally paid in money, and in many of the operations 
of production are paid before the product is fully com- 
pleted, or can be utilized, it is inferred that wages are 
drawn from pre-existing capital, and, therefore, that in- 
dustry is limited by capital— that is to say that labor can- 
not be employed until capital has been accumulated, and 
can only be employed to the extent that capital has been 
accumulated. 

Yet in the very treatises in which the limitation of in- 
dustry by capital is laid down without reservation and 
made the basis for the most important reasonings and 
elaborate theories, we are told that capital is stored-up 
or accumulated labor — "that part of wealth which is 
saved to assist future production." If we substitute for 
the word "capital" this definition of the word, the propo- 
sition carries its own refutation, for that labor cannot be 
employed until the results of labor are saved becomes too 
absurd for discussion. 

Should we, however, with this reductio ad absurdum, 
attempt to close the argument, we should probably be 
met with the explanation, not that the first laborers were 
supplied by Providence with the capital necessary to set 
them to work, but that the proposition merely refers to a 
state of society in which production has become a com- 
plex operation. 

But the fundamental truth, that in all economic rea- 
soning must be firmly grasped, and never let go, is that 
society in its most highly developed form is but an elab- 
oration of society in its rudest beginnings, and that prin- 
ciples obvious in the simpler relations of men are merely 
disguised and not abrogated or reversed by the more 
intricate relations that result from the division of labor 
and the use of complex tools and methods. The steam 



Chap. I. THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 27 

grist mill, with its complicated machinery exhibiting 
every diversity of motion, is simply what the rude stone 
mortar dug up from an ancient river bed was in its day 
— an instrument for grinding corn. And every man 
engaged in it, whether tossing wood into the furnace, 
running the engine, dressing stones, printing sacks or 
keeping books, is really devoting his labor to the same 
purpose that the pre-historic savage did when he used 
his mortar — the preparation of grain for human food. 

And so, if we reduce to their lowest terms all the com- 
plex operations of modern production, we see that each 
individual who takes part in this infinitely subdivided 
and intricate network of production and exchange is 
really doing what the primeval man did when he climbed 
the trees for fruit or followed the receding tide for shell- 
fish — endeavoring to obtain from nature by the exertion 
of his powers the satisfaction of his desires. If we keep 
this firmly in mind, if we look upon production as a 
whole — as the co-operation of all embraced in any of its 
great groups to satisfy the various desires of each, we 
plainly see that the reward each obtains for his exertions 
comes as truly and as directly from nature as the result 
of that exertion, as did that of the first man. 

To illustrate: In the simplest state of which we can 
conceive, each man digs his own bait and catches his own 
fish. The advantages of the division of labor soon be- 
come apparent, and one digs bait while the others fish. 
Yet evidently the one who digs bait is in reality doing 
as much toward the catching of fish as any of those who 
actually take the fish. So when the advantages of canoes 
are discovered, and instead of all going a-fishing, one 
stays behind and makes and repairs canoes, the canoe- 
maker is in reality devoting his labor to the taking of 
fish as much as the actual fishermen, and the fish which 
he eats at night when the fishermen come home are as 
truly the product of his labor as of theirs. And thus 



38 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

when the division of labor is fairly inaugurated, and in- 
stead of each attempting to satisfy all of his wants by 
direct resort to nature, one fishes, another hunts, a third 
picks berries, a fourth gathers fruit, a fifth makes tools, 
a sixth builds huts, and a seventh prepares clothing — 
each one is to the extent he exchanges the direct product 
of his own labor for the direct product of the labor of 
others really applying his own labor to the production 
of the things he uses — is in effect satisfying his particular 
desires by the exertion of his particular powers; that is 
to say, what he receives he in reality produces. If he 
digs roots and exchanges them for venison, he is in 
effect as truly the procurer of the venison as though he 
had gone in chase of the deer and left the huntsman to dig 
his own roots. The common expression, "I made so and 
so," signifying "I earned so and so," or "I earned money 
with which I purchased so and so," is, economically 
speaking, not metaphorically but literally true. Earning 
is making. 

Now, if we follow these principles, obvious enough in 
a simpler state of society, through the complexities of 
the state we call civilized, we shall see clearly that in 
every case in which labor is exchanged for commodities, 
production really precedes enjoyment; that wages are 
the earnings — that is to say, the makings of labor — not 
the advances of capital, and that the laborer who receives 
his wages in money (coined or printed, it may be, before 
his labor commenced) really receives in return for the 
addition his labor has made to the general stock of 
wealth, a draft upon that general stock, which he may 
utilize in any particular form of wealth that will best 
satisfy his desires; and that neither the money, which is 
but the draft, nor the particular form of wealth which 
he uses it to call for, represents advances of capital for 
his maintenance, but on the contrary represents the 
wealth, or a portion of the wealth, his labor has already 
added to the general stock. . 



Chap. 1. THE CURRENT DOCTRINE. 29 

Keeping these principles in view we see that the 
draughtsman, who, shut up in some dingy office on the 
banks of the Thames, is drawing the plans for a great 
marine engine, is in reality devoting his labor to the pro- 
duction of bread and meat as truly as though he were 
garnering the grain in California or swinging a lariat on 
a La Plata pampa; that he is as truly making his own 
clothing as though he were shearing sheep in Australia 
or weaving cloth in Paisley, and just as effectually pro- 
ducing the claret he drinks at dinner as though he 
gathered the grapes on the banks of the Garonne. The 
miner who, two thousand feet under ground in the heart 
of the Oomstock, is digging out silver ore, is, in effect, 
by virtue of a thousand exchanges, harvesting crops in 
valleys five thousand feet nearer the earth's center; chas- 
ing the whale through Arctic icefields; plucking tobacco 
leaves in Virginia; picking coffee berries in Honduras; 
cutting sugar cane on the Hawaiian Islands; gathering 
cotton in Georgia or weaving it in Manchester or Lowell; 
making quaint wooden toys for his children in the 
Hartz Mountains; or plucking amid the green and gold 
of Los Angeles orchards the oranges which, wh'en his 
shift is relieved, he will take home to his sick wife. The 
wages which he receives on Saturday night at the mouth 
of the shaft, what are they but the certificate to all the 
world that he has done these things — the primary ex- 
change in the long series which transmutes his labor into 
the things he has really been laboring for? 

All this is clear when looked at in this w^y; but to 
meet this fallacy in all its strongholds and lurking places 
we must change our investigation from the deductive to 
the inductive form. Let us now see, if, beginning with 
facts and tracing their relations, we arrive at the same 
conclusions as are thus obvious when, beginning with 
first principles, we trace their exemplification in complex 
iacts. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE MEANING OF THE TERMS, 

Before proceeding further in our inquiry, let us make 
sure of the meaning of our terms, for indistinctness in 
their use must inevitably produce ambiguity and inde- 
terminateness in reasoning. Not only is it requisite in 
economic reasoning to give to such words as "wealth/' 
"capital/' "rent/' "wages/' and the like, a much more 
definite sense than they bear in common discourse, but, 
unfortunately, even in political economy there is, as to 
some of these terms, no certain meaning assigned by 
common consent, different writers giving to the same 
term different meanings, and the same writers often 
using a term in different senses. Nothing can add to the 
force of what has been said by so many eminent authors 
as to the importance of clear and precise definitions, save 
the example, not an infrequent one, of the same authors 
falling into grave errors from the very cause they warned 
against. And nothing so shows the importance of lan- 
guage in thought as the spectacle of even acute thinkers 
basing important conclusions upon the use of the same 
word in varying senses. I shall endeavor to avoid these 
dangers. It will be my effort throughout, as any term 
becomes oi' importance, to state clearly what I mean by 
it, and to use it in that sense and in no other. Let me 
ask the reader to note and to bear in mind the definitions 
thus given, as otherwise I cannot hope to make myself 
properly understood. I shall not attempt to attach 
arbitrary meanings to words, or to coin terms, even when 



Chap. II. THE MEAtfl^G OF THE TEKMS. 31 

it would be convenient to do so, but shall conform to 
usage as closely as is possible, only endeavoring so to fix 
the meaning of words that they may clearly express 
thought. 

What we have now on hand is to discover whether, as a 
matter of fact, wages are drawn from capital. As a pre- 
liminary, let us settle what we mean by wages and what 
we mean by capital. To the former word a sufficiently 
definite meaning has been given by economic writers, but 
the ambiguities which have attached to the use of the 
latter in political econoiny will require a detailed exami- 
nation. 

As used in common discourse "wages" means a com- 
pensation paid to a hired person for his services; and we 
speak of one man "working for wages," in contradistinc- 
tion to another who is "working for himself." The use 
of the term is still further narrowed by the habit of ap- 
plying it solely to compensation paid for manual labor. 
We do not speak of the wages of professional men, man- 
agers or clerks, but of their fees, commissions, or sala- 
ries. Thus the common meaning of the word wages is 
the compensation paid to a hired person for manual 
labor. But in political economy the word wages has a 
much wider meaning, and includes all returns for exer- 
tion. For, as political economists explain, the three 
agents or factors in production are land, labor, and capi- 
tal, and that part of the produce which goes to the sec- 
ond of these factors is by them styled wages. 

Thus the term labor includes all human exertion in 
the production of wealth, and wages, being that part of 
the produce which goes to labor, includes all reward for 
such exertion. There is, therefore, in the politico-eco- 
nomic sense of the term wages no distinction as to the 
kind of labor, or as to whether its reward is received 
through an employer or not, but wages means the return 
received for the exertion of labor, as distinguished from 



32 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

the return received far the use of capital, and the return 
received by the landholder for the use of land. The man 
who cultivates the soil for himself receives his wages in 
its produce, just as, if he uses his own capital and owns 
his own land, he may also receive interest and rent; the 
hunter's wages are the game he kills; the fisherman's 
wages are the fish he takes. The gold washed out by the 
self-employing gold-digger is as much his wages as the 
money paid to the hired coal miner by the purchaser of 
his labor,* and, as Adam Smith shows, the high profits 
of retail storekeepers are in large part wages, being the 
recompense of their labor and not of their capital. In 
short, whatever is received as the result or reward of ex- 
ertion is "wages." 

This is all it is now necessary to note as to "wages," 
but it is important to keep this in mind. For in the 
standard economic works this sense of the term wages is 
recognized with greater or less clearness only to be sub- 
sequently ignored. 

But it is more difficult to clear away from the idea of 
capital the ambiguities that beset it, and to fix the 
scientific use of the term. In general discourse, all sorts 
of things that have a value or will yield a return are 
vaguely spoken of as capital, while economic writers vary 
so widely that the term can hardly be said to have a fixed 
meaning. Let us compare with each other the defini- 
tions of a few representative writers: 

"That part of a man's stock," says Adam Smith (Book 
II, Chap. I), "which he expects to afford him a revenue, 
is called his capital," and the capital of a country or 
society, he goes on to say, consists of (1) machines and 
instruments of trade which facilitate and abridge labor; 

* This was recognized in common speech in California, where the 
placer miners styled their earnings their " wages," and spoke of 
making high wages or low wages according to the amount of gold 
taken out. 



Chap. II. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 33 

(2) buildings,, not mere dwellings, but which may be con- 
sidered instruments of trade — such as shops, farmhouses, 
etc.; (3) improvements of land which better fit it for 
tillage or culture; (4) the acquired and useful abilities 
of all the inhabitants; (5) money; (6) provisions in the 
hands of producers and dealers, from the sale of which 
they expect to derive a profit; (7) the material of, or 
partially completed, manufactured articles still in the 
hands of producers or dealers; (8) completed articles 
still in the hands of producers or dealers. The first four 
of these he styles fixed capital, and the last four circulat- 
ing capital, a distinction of which it is not necessary to 
our purpose to take any note. 
Kicardo's definition is: 

"Capital is that part of the wealth of a country which is em- 
ployed in production, and consists of food, clothing, tools, raw 
materials, machinery, etc., necessary to give effect to labor." — 
Principles of Political Economy , Chapter V. 

This definition, it will be seen, is very different from 
that of Adam Smith, as it excludes many of the things 
which he includes — as acquired talents, articles of mere 
taste or luxury in the possession of producers or dealers; 
and includes some things he excludes — such as food, 
clothing, etc., in the possession of the consumer. 

McOulloch's definition is: 

" The capital of a nation really comprises all those portions of the 
produce of industry existing in it that may be directly employed 
either to support human existence or to facilitate production." — 
Notes on Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chap. I. 

This definition follows the line of Kicardo's, but is 
wider. While it excludes everything that is not capable 
of aiding production, it includes everything that is so 
capable, without reference to actual use or necessity for 
use — the horse drawing a pleasure carriage being, accord- 
ing to McCulloeh's view, as he expressly states, as much 



34 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I. 

capital as the horse drawing a plow, "because he may, if 
need arises, be used to draw a plow. 

John Stuart Mill, following the same general line as 
Eicardo and McCulloch, makes neither the use nor the 
capability of use, but the determination to use, the test 
of capital. He says: 

' 4 Whatever things are destined to supply productive labor with 
the shelter, protection, tools and materials which the work requires, 
and to feed and otherwise maintain the laborer during the process, 
are capital." — Principles of Political Economy, Book 7, Chap. IV. 

These quotations sufficiently illustrate the divergence 
of the masters. Among minor authors the variance is 
still greater, as a few examples will suffice to show. 

Professor Wayland, whose "Elements of Political 
Economy" has long been a favorite text-book in Amer- 
ican educational institutions, where there has been any 
pretense of teaching political economy, gives this lucid 
definition: 

" The word capital is used in two senses. In relation to product 
it means any substance on which industry is to be exerted. In re- 
lation to industry, the material on which industry is about to confer 
value, that on which it has conferred value; the instruments which 
are used for the conferring of value, as well as the means of suste- 
nance by which the being is supported while he is engaged in per- 
forming the operation." — Elements of Political Economy, Book I, 
CJiap. I. 

Henry C. Carey, the American apostle of protection- 
ism, defines capital as "the instrument by which man 
obtains mastery over nature, including in it the physical 
and mental powers of man himself." Professor Perry, a 
Massachusetts free trader, very properly objects to this 
that it hopelessly confuses the boundaries between capi- 
tal and labor, and then himself hopelessly confuses the 
boundaries between capital and land by defining capital 
as "any valuable thing outside of man himself from 
whose use springs a pecuniary increase or profit." An 



Chap. II THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 35 

English economic writer of high standing, Mr. Wm. 
Thornton, begins an elaborate examination of the rela- 
tions of labor and capital ("On Labor") by stating that 
he will include land with capital, which is very much as 
if one who proposed to teach algebra should begin with 
the declaration that he would consider the signs plus and 
minus as meaning the same thing and having the same 
value. An American writer, also of high standing, Pro- 
fessor Francis A. Walker, makes the same declaration in 
his elaborate book on "The Wages Question." Another 
English writer, N. A. Nicholson ("The Science of Ex- 
changes," London, 1873), seems to cap the climax of 
absurdity by declaring in one paragraph (p. 26) that 
"capital must of course be accumulated by saving," and 
in the very next paragraph stating that "the land which 
produces a crop, the plow which turns the soil, the labor 
which secures the produce, and the produce itself, if a 
material profit is to be derived from its employment, are all 
alike capital." But how land and labor are to be accu- 
mulated by saving them he nowhere condescends to ex- 
plain. In the same way a standard American writer, 
Professor Amasa W T alker (p. 66, "Science of Wealth"), 
first declares that capital arises from the net savings of 
labor and then immediately afterward declares that land 
is capital. 

I might go on for pages, citing contradictory and self- 
contradictory definitions. But it would only weary the 
reader. It is unnecessary to multiply quotations. Those 
already given are sufficient to show how wide a difference 
exists as to the comprehension of the term capital. Any 
one who wants further illustration of the "confusion 
worse confounded" which exists on this subject among 
the professors of political economy may find it in any 
library where the works of these professors are ranged 
side by side. 

Now, it makes little difference what name we give to 



36 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

things, if when we use the name we always keep in view 
the same things and no others. But the difficulty arising 
in economic reasoning from these vague and varying 
definitions of capital is that it is only in the premises of 
reasoning that the term is used in the peculiar sense as- 
signed by the definition, while in the practical conclusions 
that are reached it is always used, or at least it is always 
understood, in one general and definite sense. When, 
for instance, it is said that wages are drawn from capital, 
the word capital is understood in the same sense as when 
we speak of the scarcity or abundance, the increase or 
decrease, the destruction or increment, of capital — a com- 
monly understood and definite sense which separates 
capital from the other factors of production, land and 
labor, and also separates it from like things used merely 
for gratification. In fact, most people understand well 
enough what capital is until they begin to define it, and 
I think their works will show that the economic writers 
who differ so widely in their definitions use the term in 
this commonly understood sense in all cases except in 
their definitions and the reasoning based on them. 

This common sense of the term is that of wealth de- 
voted to procuring more wealth. Dr. Adam Smith cor- 
rectly expresses this common idea when he says: "That 
part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him 
revenue is called his capital." And the capital of a 
community is evidently the sum of such individual 
stocks, or that part of the aggregate stock which is ex- 
pected to procure more wealth. This also is the deriva- 
tive sense of the term. The word capital, as philologists 
trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was 
estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon 
the number of head he could keep for their increase. 

The difficulties which beset the use of the word capu 
tal, as an exact term, and which are even more strikingly 
exemplified in current political and social discussions 



Chap. II. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 37 

than in the definitions of economic writers, arise from 
two facts — first, that certain classes of things, the pos- 
session of which to the individual is precisely equivalent 
to the possession of capital, are not part of the capital of 
the community; and, second, that things of the same 
kind may or may not be capital, according to the pur- 
pose to which they are devoted. 

With a little care as to these points, there should be 
no difficulty in obtaining a sufficiently clear and fixed 
idea of what the term capital as generally used properly 
includes; such an idea as will enable us to say what 
things are capital and what are not, and to use the word 
without ambiguity or slip. 

Land, labor, and capital are the three factors of pro- 
duction. If we remember that capital is thus a term used 
in contradistinction to land and labor, we at once see 
that nothing properly included under either one of these 
terms can be properly classed as capital. The term land 
necessarily includes, not merely the surface of the earth 
as distinguished from the water and the air, but the 
whole material universe outside of man himself, for it is 
only by having access to land, from which his very body 
is drawn, that man can come in contact with or use 
nature. The term land embraces, in short, all natural 
materials, forces, and opportunities, and, therefore, 
nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly 
classed as capital. A fertile field, a rich vein of ore, a fall- 
ing stream which supplies power, may give to the possessor 
advantages equivalent to the possession of capital, but to 
class such things as capital would be to put an end to the 
distinction between land and capital, and, so far as they 
relate to each other, to make the two terms meaningless. 
The term labor, in like manner, includes all human 
exertion, and hence human powers whether natural or 
acquired can never properly be classed as capital. In 
common parlance we often speak of a man's knowledge, 



38 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I. 

skill, or industry as constituting his capital; but this is 
evidently a metaphorical use of language that must be 
eschewed in reasoning that aims at exactness. Superi- 
ority in such qualities may augment the income of an 
individual just as capital would, and an increase in the 
knowledge, skill, or industry of a community may have 
the same effect in increasing its production as would an 
increase of capital; but this effect is due to the increased 
power of labor and not to capital. Increased velocity 
may give to the impact of a cannon ball the same effect 
as increased weight, yet, nevertheless, weight is one 
thing and velocity another. 

Thus we must exclude from the category of capital 
everything that may be included either as land or labor. 
Doing so, there remain only things which are neither 
land nor labor, but which have resulted from the union 
of these two original factors of production. Nothing 
can be properly capital that does not consist of these — 
that is to say, nothing can be capital that is not wealth. 

But it is from ambiguities in the use of this inclusive 
term wealth that many of the ambiguities which beset 
the term capital are derived. 

As commonly used the word "wealth" is applied to 
anything having an exchange value. But when used as a 
term of political economy it must be limited to a much 
more definite meaning, because many things are commonly 
spoken of as wealth which in taking account of collective 
or general wealth cannot be considered as wealth at all. 
Such things have an exchange value, and are commonly 
spoken of as wealth, insomuch as they represent as be- 
tween individuals, or between sets of individuals, the 
power of obtaining wealth; but they are not truly wealth, 
inasmuch as their increase or decrease does not affect the 
sum of wealth. Such are bonds, mortgages, promissory 
notes, bank bills, or other stipulations for the transfer of 
wealth. Such are slaves, whose value represents merely 



Chap. II. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 39 

the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of 
another class. Such are lands, or other natural oppor- 
tunities, the value of which is but the result of the ac- 
knowledgment in favor of certain persons of an exclusive 
right to their use, and which represents merely the 
power thus given to the owners to demand a share of the 
wealth produced by those who use them. Increase in 
the amount of bonds, mortgages, notes, or bank bills 
cannot increase the wealth of the community that in- 
cludes as well those who promise to pay as those who are 
entitled to receive. The enslavement of a part of their 
number could not increase the wealth of a people, for 
what the enslavers gained the enslaved would lose. In- 
crease in land values does not represent increase in the 
common wealth, for what land owners gain by higher 
prices, the tenants or purchasers who must pay them 
will lose. And all this relative wealth, which, in com- 
mon thought and speech, in legislation and law, is un- 
distinguished from actual wealth, could, without the 
destruction or consumption of anything more than a few 
drops of ink and a piece of paper, be utterly annihilated. 
By enactment of the sovereign political power debts 
might be canceled, slaves emancipated, and land resumed 
as the common property of the whole people, without the 
aggregate wealth being diminished by the value of a 
pinch of snuff, for what some would lose others would 
gain. There would be no more destruction of wealth 
than there was creation of wealth when Elizabeth Tudor 
enriched her favorite courtiers by the grant of mo- 
nopolies, or when Boris Godoonof made Eussian peasants 
merchantable property. 

All things which have an exchange value are, therefore, 
not wealth, in the only sense in which the term can be 
used in political economy. Only such things can be 
wealth the production of which increases and the destruc- 
tion of which decreases the aggregate of wealth. If we 



40 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book 1 

consider what these things are, and what their nature is, 
we shall have no difficulty in defining wealth. 

When we speak of a community increasing in wealth 
— as when we say that England has increased in wealth 
since the accession of Victoria, or that California is a 
wealthier country than when it was a Mexican territory 
— we do not mean to say that there is more land, or that 
the natural powers of the land are greater, or that there 
are more people, for when we wish to express that idea 
we speak of increase of population; or that the debts or 
dues owing by some of these people to others of their 
number have increased; but we mean that there is an in- 
crease of certain tangible things, having an actual and 
not merely a relative value — such as buildings, cattle, 
tools, machinery, agricultural and mineral products, 
manufactured goods, ships, wagons, furniture, and the 
like. The increase of such things constitutes an increase 
of wealth; their decrease is a lessening of wealth; and 
the community that, in proportion to its numbers, has 
most of such things is the wealthiest community. The 
common character of these things is that they consist of 
natural substances or products which have been adapted 
by human labor to human use or gratification, their value 
depending on the amount of labor which upon the aver- 
age would be required to produce things of like kind. 

Thus wealth, as alone the term can be used in political 
economy, consists of natural products that have been se- 
cured, moved, combined, separated, or in other ways 
modified by human exertion, so as to fit them for the 
gratification of human desires. It is, in other words, 
labor impressed upon matter in such a way as to store 
up, as the heat of the sun is stored up in coal, the power 
of human labor to minister to human desires. Wealth is 
not the sole object of labor, for labor is also expended in 
ministering directly to desire; but it is the object and 
result of what we call productive labor — that is, labor 



Chap. II. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 41 

•which gives value to material things. Nothing which 
nature supplies to man without his labor is wealth, nor 
yet does the expenditure of labor result in wealth unless 
there is a tangible product which has and retains the 
power of ministering to desire. 

Now, as capital is wealth devoted to a certain purpose, 
nothing can be capital which does not fall within this 
definition of wealth. By recognizing and keeping this 
in mind, we get rid of misconceptions which vitiate all 
reasoning in which they are permitted, which befog pop- 
ular thought, and have led into mazes of contradiction 
even acute thinkers. 

But though all capital is wealth, all wealth is not capi- 
tal. Capital is only a part of wealth — that part, namely, 
which is devoted to the aid of production. It is in draw- 
ing this line between the wealth that is and the wealth 
that is not capital that a second class of misconceptions 
are likely to occur. 

The errors which I have been pointing out, and which 
consist in confounding with wealth and capital things 
essentially distinct, or which have but a relative exist- 
ence, are now merely vulgar errors. They are wide- 
spread, it is true, and have a deep root, being held, not 
merely by the less educated classes, but seemingly by a 
large majority of those who in such advanced countries 
as England and the United States mold and guide public 
opinion, make the laws in Parliaments, Congresses and 
Legislatures, and administer them in the courts. They 
crop out, moreover, in the disquisitions of many of those 
flabby writers who have burdened the press and dark- 
ened counsel by numerous volumes which are dubbed 
political economy, and which pass as text-books with the 
ignorant and as authority with those who do not think 
for themselves. Neverthless, they are only vulgar errors, 
inasmuch as they receive no countenance from the best 
writers on political economy. By one of those lapses 



42 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I. 

which flaw his great work and strikingly evince the im- 
perfections of the highest talent, Adam Smith counts as 
capital certain personal qualities, an inclusion which is 
not consistent with his original definition of capital as 
stock from which revenue is expected. But this error 
has been avoided by his most eminent successors, and in 
the definitions, previously given, of Eicardo, McCulloch, 
and Mill, it is not involved. Neither in their defini- 
tions nor in that of Smith is involved the vulgar error 
which confounds as real capital things which are only rela- 
tively capital, such as evidences of debt, land values, etc. 
But as to things which are really wealth, their definitions 
differ from each other, and widely from that of Smith, 
as to what is and what is not to be considered as capital. 
The stock of a jeweler would, for instance, be included 
as capital by the definition of Smith, and the food or 
clothing in possession of a laborer would be excluded. 
But the definitions of Eicardo and McCulloch would ex- 
clude the stock of the jeweler, as would also that of Mill, 
if understood as most persons would understand the 
words I have quoted. But as explained by him, it is 
neither the nature nor the destination of the things 
themselves which determines whether they are or are not 
capital, but the intention of the owner to devote either 
the things or the value received from their sale to the 
supply of productive labor with tools, materials, and 
maintenance. All these definitions, however, agree in 
including as capital the provisions and clothing of the 
laborer, which Smith excludes. 

Let us consider these three definitions, which repre- 
sent the best teachings of current political economy: 

To McCulloch's definition of capital as "all those por- 
tions of the produce of industry that may be directly 
employed either to support human existence or to facil- 
itate production/' there are obvious objections. One 
may pass along any principal street in a thriving town 



Chap. 11. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 43 

or city and see stores filled with all sorts of valuable 
things, which, though they cannot be employed either 
to support human existence or to facilitate production, 
undoubtedly constitute part of the capital of the store- 
keepers and part of the capital of the community. And 
he can also see products of industry capable of support- 
ing human existence or facilitating production being 
consumed in ostentation or useless luxury. Surely these, 
though they might, do not constitute part of capital. 

Kicardo's definition avoids including as capital things 
which might be but are not employed in production, by 
covering only such as are employed. But it is open to 
the first objection made to McCulloch's. If only wealth 
that may be, or that is, or that is destined to be, used in 
supporting producers, or assisting production, is capital, 
then the stocks of jewelers, toy dealers, tobacconists, 
confectioners, picture dealers, etc. — in fact, all stocks 
that consist of, and all stocks in so far as they consist of 
articles of luxury, are not capital. 

If Mill, by remitting the distinction to the mind of the 
capitalist, avoids this difficulty (which does not seem to 
me clear), it is by making the distinction so vague that 
no power short of omnisicence could tell in any given 
country at any given time what was and what was not 
capital. 

But the great defect which these definitions have in 
common is that they include what clearly cannot be ac- 
counted capital, if any distinction is to be made between 
laborer and capitalist. For they bring into the category 
of capital the food, clothing, etc., in the possession of 
the day laborer, which he will consume whether he 
works or not, as well as the stock in the hands of the 
capitalist, with which he proposes to pay the laborer for 
his work. 

Yet, manifestly, this is not the sense in which the 
herm capital is used by these writers when they speak of 



44 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Boole I. 

labor and capital as taking separate parts in the work of 
production and separate shares in the distribution of its 
proceeds; when they speak of wages as drawn from capi- 
tal, or as depending upon the ratio between labor and 
capital, or in any of the ways in which the term is gen- 
erally used by them. In all these cases the term capital 
is used in its commonly understood sense, as that portion 
of wealth which its owners do not propose to use directly 
for their own gratification, but for the purpose of obtain- 
ing more wealth. In short, by political economists, in 
everything except their definitions and first principles, 
as well as by the world at large, "that part of a man's 
stock," to use the words of Adam Smith, "which he ex- 
pects to afford him revenue is called his capital." This 
is the only sense in which the term capital expresses any 
fixed idea — the only sense in which we can with any 
clearness separate it from wealth and contrast it with 
labor. For, if we must consider as capital everything 
which supplies the laborer with food, clothing, shelter, 
etc., then to find a laborer who is not a capitalist we shall 
be forced to hunt up an absolutely naked man, destitute 
even of a sharpened stick, or of a burrow in the ground 
— a situation in which, save as the result of exceptional 
circumstances, human beings have never yet been found. 
It seems to me that the variance and inexactitude in 
these definitions arise from the fact that the idea of what 
capital is has been deduced from a preconceived idea of 
how capital assists production. Instead of determining 
what capital is, and then observing what capital does, 
the functions of capital have first been assumed, and 
then a definition of capital made which includes all 
things which do or may perform those functions. Let 
us reverse this process, and, adopting the natural order, 
ascertain what the thing is before settling what it does. 
All we are trying to do, all that it is necessary to do, is to 
fix, as it were, the metes and bounds of a term that in 



Chap. II. THE MEANING OF THE TEEMS. 45 

the main is well apprehended — to make definite, that is, 
sharp and clear on its verges, a common idea. 

If the articles of actual wealth existing at a given time 
in a given community were presented in situ to a dozen 
intelligent men who had never read a line of political 
economy, it is doubtful if they would differ in respect to 
a single item, as to whether it should be accounted capi- 
tal or not. Money which its owner holds for use in his 
business or in speculation would be accounted capital; 
money set aside for household or personal expenses 
would not. That part of a farmer's crop held for sale or 
for seed, or to feed his help in part payment of wages, 
would be accounted capital; that held for the use of his 
own family would not be. The horses and carriage of 
a hackman would be classed as capital, but an equipage 
kept for the pleasure of its owner would not. So no one 
would think of counting as capital the false hair on the 
head of a woman, the cigar in the mouth of a smoker, or 
the toy with which a child is playing; but the stock of a 
hair dealer, of a tobacconist, or of the keeper of a toy 
store, would be unhesitatingly set down as capital. A 
coat which a tailor had made for sale would be accounted 
capital, but not the coat he had made for himself. Food 
in the possession of a hotel-keeper or a restaurateur 
would be accounted capital, but not the food in the 
pantry of a housewife, or in the lunch basket of a work- 
man. Pig iron in the hands of the smelter, or founder, 
or dealer, would be accounted capital, but not the pig 
iron used as ballast in the hold of a yacht. The bellows 
of a blacksmith, the looms of a factory, would be capital, 
but not the sewing machine of a woman who does only 
her own work; a building let for hire, or used for busi- 
ness or productive purposes, but not a homestead. In 
short, I think we should find that now, as when Dr. 
Adam Smith wrote, "that part of a man's stock which he 
expects to yield him a revenue is called his capital." 



46 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I. 

And, omitting his unfortunate slip as to personal quali- 
ties, and qualifying somewhat his enumeration of money, 
it is doubtful if we could better list the different articles 
of capital than did Adam Smith in the passage which in 
the previous part of this chapter I have condensed. 

Now, if, after having thus separated the wealth that is 
capital from the wealth that is not capital, we look for 
the distinction between the two classes, we shall not find 
it to be as to the character, capabilities, or final destina- 
tion of the things themselves, as has been vainly at- 
tempted to draw it; bi^t it seems to me that we shall find 
it to be as to whether they are or are not in the posses- 
sion of the consumer.* Such articles of wealth as in 
themselves, in their uses, or in their products, are yet to 
be exchanged are capital; such articles of wealth as are in 
the hands of the consumer are not capital. Hence, if we 
define capital as wealth in course of exchange, understand- 
ing exchange to include not merely the passing from hand 
to hand, but also such transmutations as occur when the 
reproductive or transforming forces of nature are utilized 
for the increase of wealth, we shall, I think, comprehend 
all the things that the general idea of capital properly 
includes, and shut out all it does not. Under this defini- 
tion, it seems to me, for instance, will fall all such tools 
as are really capital. For it is as to whether its services 
or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool 
an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. 

* Money may be said to be in the hands of the consumer when 
devoted to the procurement of gratification, as, though not in itself 
devoted to consumption, it represents wealth which is; and thus 
what in the previous paragraph I have given as the common classifi- 
cation would be covered by this distinction, and would be substan- 
tially correct. In speaking of money in this connection, I am of 
course speaking of coin, for although paper money may perform all 
the functions of coin, it is not wealth, and cannot therefore be 
capital. 



Chap.U. THE MEANING OF THE TERMS. 47 

Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things 
which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept 
by a gentleman for his own amusement is not. Thus, 
wealth used in the construction of a railroad, a public 
telegraph line, a stage coach, a theater, a hotel, etc., may 
be said to be placed in the course of exchange. The ex- 
change is not effected all at once, but little by little, with 
an indefinite number of people. Yet there is an ex- 
change, and the "consumers" of the railroad, the tele- 
graph line, the stage coach, theater or hotel, are not the 
owners, but the persons who from time to time use them. 

Nor is this definition inconsistent with the idea that 
capital is that part of wealth devoted to production. It 
is too narrow an understanding of production which con- 
fines it merely to the making of things. Production in- 
cludes not merely the making of things, but the bringing 
of them to the consumer. The merchant or storekeeper 
is thus as truly a producer as is the manufacturer, or 
farmer, and his stock or capital is as much devoted to 
production as is theirs. But it is not worth while now 
to dwell upon the functions of capital, which we shall be 
better able to determine hereafter. Nor is the definition 
of capital I have suggested of any importance. I am not 
writing a text-book, but only attempting to discover the 
laws which control a great social problem, and if the 
reader has been led to form a clear idea of what things 
are meant when we speak of capital my purpose is served. 

But before closing this digression let me call attention 
to what is often forgotten — namely, that the term8 
"wealth," "capital," "wages," and the like, as used in 
political economy are abstract terms, and that nothing 
can be generally affirmed or denied of them that cannot 
be affirmed or denied of the whole class of things they 
represent. The failure to bear this in mind has led to 
much confusion of thought, and permits fallacies, other- 
wise transparent, to pass for obvious truths. Wealth 



48 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Boole I 

being an abstract term, the idea of wealth, it must be 
remembered, involves the idea of exchange ability. The 
possession of wealth to a certain amount is potentially 
the possession of any or all species of wealth to that 
equivalent in exchange. And, consequently, so of 
capital. 



CHAPTER III. 

WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL, BUT PRODUCED BY 

THE LABOR. 

The importance of this digression will, I think, be- 
come more and more apparent as we proceed in our in- 
quiry, but its pertinency to the branch we are now 
engaged in may at once be seen. 

It is at first glance evident that the economic meaning 
of the term wages is lost sight of, and attention is con- 
centrated upon the common and narrow meaning of the 
word, when it is affirmed that wages are drawn from 
capital. For, in all those cases in which the laborer is 
his own employer and takes directly the produce of his 
labor as its reward, it is plain enough that wages are not 
drawn from capital, but result directly as the product of 
the labor. If, for instance, I devote my labor to gather- 
ing birds' eggs or picking wild berries, the eggs or berries 
I thus get are my wages. Surely no one will contend 
that in such a case wages are drawn from capital. There 
is no capital in the case. An absolutely naked man, 
thrown on an island where no human being has before 
trod, may gather birds' eggs or pick berries. 

Or if I take a piece of leather and work it up into a 
pair of shoes, the shoes are my wages — the reward of my 
exertion. Surely they are not drawn from capital — 
either my capital or any one else's capital — but are 
brought into existence by the labor of which they become 
the wages; and in obtaining this pair of shoes as the 
wages of my labor, capital is not even momentarily less- 



50 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book 1. 

ened one iota. For, if we call in the idea of capital, my 
capital at the beginning consists of the piece of leather, 
the thread, etc. As my labor goes on, value is steadily 
added, until, when my labor results in the finished shoes, 
I have my capital plus the difference in value between 
the material and the shoes. In obtaining this additional 
value — my wages — how is capital at any time drawn 
upon? 

Adam Smith, who gave the direction to economic 
thought that has resulted in the current elaborate theories 
of the relation between wages and capital, recognized the 
fact that in such simple cases as I have instanced, wages 
are the produce of labor, and thus begins his chapter 
upon the wages of labor (Chapter VIII): 

*' The produce of labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages 
of labor. In that original state of things which precedes both the 
appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole 
produce of labor belongs to the laborer. He has neither landlord nor 
master to share with him." 

Had the great Scotchman taken this as the initial point 
of his reasoning, and continued to regard the produce of 
labor as the natural wages of labor, and the landlord and 
master but as sharers, his conclusions would have been 
very different, and political economy to-day would not 
embrace such a mass of contradictions and absurdities; 
but instead of following the truth obvious in the simple 
modes of production as a clew through the perplexities of 
the more complicated forms, he momentarily recognizes 
it, only immediately to abandon it, and stating that "in 
every part of Europe twenty workmen serve under a 
master for one that is independent," he recommences the 
inquiry from a point of view in which the master is con- 
sidered as providing from his capital the wages of his 
workmen. 

It is evident that in thus placing the proportion of 



Chap. III. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 51 

self-employing workmen as but one in twenty, Adam 
Smith had in mind but the mechanic arts, and that, in- 
cluding all laborers, the proportion who take their earn- 
ings directly, without the intervention of an employer, 
must, even in Europe a hundred years ago, have been 
much greater than this. For, besides the independent 
laborers who in every community exist in considerable 
numbers, the agriculture of large districts of Europe 
has, since the time of the Koman Empire, been carried 
on by the metayer system, under which the capitalist re- 
ceives his return from the laborer instead of the laborer 
from the capitalist. At any rate, in the United States, 
where any general law of wages must apply as fully as in 
Europe, and where in spite of the advance of manufac- 
tures a very large part of the people are yet self-employ- 
ing farmers, the proportion of laborers who get their 
wages through an employer must be comparatively small. 
But it is not necessary to discuss the ratio in which self- 
employing laborers anywhere stand to hired laborers, nor 
is it necessary to multiply illustrations of the truism that 
where the laborer takes directly his wages they are the 
product of his labor, for as soon as it is realized that the 
term wages includes all the earnings of labor, as well when 
taken directly by the laborer in the results of his labor 
as when received from an employer, it is evident that 
the assumption that wages are drawn from capital, on 
which as a universal truth such a vast superstructure is 
in standard politico -economic treatises so unhesitatingly 
built, is at least in large part untrue, and the utmost 
that can with any plausibility be affirmed, is that some 
wages, i.e. wages received by the laborer from an em- 
ployer, are drawn from capital. This restriction of the 
major premise at once invalidates all the deductions that 
are made from it; but without resting here, let us see 
whether even in this restricted sense it accords with the 
facts. Let us pick up the clew where Adam Smith 



52 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

dropped it, and advancing step by step, see whether the 
relation of facts which is obvious in the simplest forms 
of production does not run through the most complex. 

Next in simplicity to "that original state of things/ 3 
of which many examples may yet be found, where the 
whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer, is the ar- 
rangement in which the laborer, though working for 
another person, or with the capital of another person, 
receives his wages in kind — that is to say, in the things 
his labor produces. In this case it is as clear 
as in the case of the self-employing laborer that 
the wages are really drawn from the product of the 
labor, and not at all from capital. If I hire a man 
to gather eggs, to pick berries, or to make shoes, paying 
him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes that his 
labor secures, there can be no question that the source 
of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. Of 
this form of hiring is the saer-and-daer stock tenancy, 
treated of with such perspicuity by Sir Henry Maine in 
his "Early History of Institutions/' and which so clearly 
involved the relation of employer and employed as to 
render the accepter of cattle the man or vassal of the 
capitalist who thus employed him. It was on such terms 
as these that Jacob worked for Laban, and to this day, 
even in civilized countries, it is not an infrequent mode 
of employing labor. The farming of land on shares, 
which prevails to a considerable extent in the Southern 
States of the Union and in California, the metayer system 
of Europe, as well as the many cases in which superin- 
tendents, salesmen, etc., are paid by a percentage of prof- 
its, what are they but the employment of labor for wages 
which consist of part of its produce? 

The next step in the advance from simplicity to com- 
plexity is where the wages, though estimated in kind, 
are paid in an equivalent of something else. For in- 
stance, on American whaling ships the custom is not to 



Chap. III. WAGES NOT DRAWN PROM CAPITAL. 53 

pay fixed wages, but a "lay," or proportion of the catch, 
which varies from a sixteenth to a twelfth to the captain 
down to a three-hundredth to the cabin-boy. Thus, 
when a whaleship comes into New Bedford or San Fran- 
cisco after a successful cruise, she carries in her hold the 
wages of her crew, as well as the profits of her owners, 
and an equivalent which will reimburse them for all the 
stores used up during the voyage. Can anything be 
clearer than that these wages — this oil and bone which 
the crew of the whaler have taken — have not been drawn 
from capital, but are really a part of the produce of their 
labor? Nor is this fact changed or obscured in the 
slightest degree where, as a matter of convenience, in- 
stead of dividing up between the crew their proportion 
of the oil and bone, the value of each man's share is esti- 
mated at the market price, and he is paid for it in 
money. The money is but the equivalent of the real 
wages, the oil and bone. In no way is there any advance 
of capital in this payment. The obligation to pay wages 
does not accrue until the value from which they are to 
be paid is brought into port. At the moment when the 
owner takes from his capital money to pay the crew he 
adds to his capital oil and bone. 

So far there can be no dispute. Let us now take 
another step, which will bring us to the usual method of 
employing labor and paying wages. 

The Farallone Islands, off the Bay of San Francisco, 
are a hatching ground of sea-fowl, and a company who 
claim these islands employ men in the proper season to 
collect the eggs. They might employ these men for a 
proportion of the eggs they gather, as is done in the 
whale fishery and probably would do so if there were 
much uncertainty attending the business; but as the fowl 
are plentiful and tame, and about so many eggs can be 
gathered by so much labor, they find it more convenient 
to pay their men fixed wages. The men go out and re- 



54 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Booh L 

main on the islands, gathering the eggs and bringing 
them to a landing, whence, at intervals of a few days, 
they are taken in a small vessel to San Francisco and 
sold. When the season is over the men return and are 
paid their stipulated wages in coin. Does not this trans- 
action amount to the same thing as if, instead of being 
paid in coin, the stipulated wages were paid in an equiva- 
lent of the eggs gathered? Does not the coin represent 
the eggs, by the sale of which it was obtained, and are 
not these wages as much the product of the labor for 
which they are paid as the eggs would be in the posses- 
sion of a man who gathered them for himself without the 
intervention of any employer? 

To take another example, which shows by reversion 
the identity of wages in money with wages in kind. In 
San Buenaventura lives a man who makes an excellent 
living by shooting for their oil and skins the common 
hair seals which frequent the islands forming the Santa 
Barbara Channel. When on these sealing expeditions he 
takes two or three Chinamen along to help him, whom 
at first he paid wholly in coin. But it seems that the 
Chinese highly value some of the organs of the seal, 
which they dry and pulverize for medicine, as well as 
the long hairs in the whiskers of the male seal, which, 
when over a certain length, they greatly esteem for 
some purpose that to outside barbarians is not very 
clear. And this man soon found that the Chinamen 
were very willing to take instead of money these parts of 
the seals killed, so that now, in large part, he thus pays 
them their wages. 

Now, is not what may be seen in all these cases — the 
identity of wages in money with wages in kind — true of 
all cases in which wages are paid for productive labor? Is 
not the fund created by the labor really the fund from 
which the wages are paid? 

1^ mav, perhaps, be said: "There is this difference— 



Chap. III. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 55 

where a man works for himself, or where, when working 
for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages 
depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from 
any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When 
he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages 
anyhow — they depend upon the performance of the labor, 
not upon the result of the labor." But this is evidently 
not a real distinction. For on the average, the labor 
that is rendered for fixed wages not only yields the 
amount of the wages, but more; else employers could 
make no profit. When wages are fixed, the employer 
takes the whole risk and is compensated for this assur- 
ance, for wages when fixed are always somewhat less than 
wages contingent. But though when fixed wages are 
stipulated the laborer who has performed his part of the 
contract has usually a legal claim upon the employer, it 
is frequently, if not generally, the case that the disaster 
which prevents the employer from reaping benefit from 
the labor prevents him from paying the wages. And in 
one important department of industry the employer is 
legally exempt in case of disaster, although the contract 
be for wages certain and not contingent. For the maxim 
of admiralty law is, that "freight is the mother of 
wages," and though the seaman may have performed his 
part, the disaster which prevents the ship from earning 
freight deprives him of claim for his wages. 

In this legal maxim is embodied the truth for which I 
am contending. Production is always the mother of 
wages. Without production, wages would not and could 
not be. It is from the produce of labor, not from the 
advances of capital that wages come. 

Wherever we analyze the facts this will be found to be 
true. For labor always precedes wages. This is as uni- 
versally true of wages received by the laborer from an 
employer as it is of wages taken directly by the laborer 
who is his own employer. In the one class of cases as 



56 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

in the other, reward is conditioned upon exertion. Paid 
sometimes by the day, oftener by the week or month, 
occasionally by the year, and in many branches of pro- 
duction by the piece, the payment of wages by an em- 
ployer to an employee always implies the previous ren- 
dering of labor by the employee for the benefit of the 
employer, for the few cases in which advance payments 
are made for personal services are evidently referable 
either to charity or to guarantee and purchase. The 
name "retainer," given to advance payments to lawyers, 
shows the true character of the transaction, as does the 
name "blood money" given in 'longshore vernacular to a 
payment which is nominally wages advanced to sailors, 
but which in reality is purchase money — both English 
and American law considering a sailor as much a chattel 
as a pig. 

I dwell on this obvious fact that labor always precedes 
wages, because it is all-important to an understanding of 
the more complicated phenomena of wages that it should 
be kept in mind. And obvious as it is, as I have put it, 
the plausibility of the proposition that wages are drawn 
from capital — a proposition that is made the basis for 
such important and far-reaching deductions — comes in 
the first instance from a statement that ignores and leads 
the attention away from this truth. That statement is, 
that labor cannot exert its productive power unless sup- 
plied by capital with maintenance.* The unwary reader 

* Industry is limited by capital. . . There can be no more in- 
dustry than is supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. 
Self-evident as the thing is, it is often forgotten that the people of a 
country are maintained and have their wants supplied not by the 
produce of present labor, but of past. They consume what has 
been produced, not what is about to be produced. Now, of what 
\ias been produced a part only is allotted to the support of pro- 
active labor, and there will not and cannot be more of that labor 



Chap. 111. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 57 

at once recognizes the fact that the laborer must have 
food, clothing, etc., in order to enable him to perform 
the work, and having been told that the food, clothing, 
etc., used by productive laborers are capital, he assents 
to the conclusion that the consumption of capital is nec- 
essary to the application of labor, and from this it is but 
an obvious deduction that industry is limited by capital 
— that the demand for labor depends upon the supply of 
capital, and hence that wages depend upon the ratio be- 
tween the number of laborers looking for employment 
and the amount of capital devoted to hiring them. 

But I think the discussion in the previous chapter will 
enable any one to see wherein lies the fallacy of this rea- 
soning — a fallacy which has entangled some of the most 
acute minds in a web of their own spinning, It is in the 
use of the term capital in two senses. In the primary 
proposition that capital is necessary to the exertion of 
productive labor, the term "capital" is understood as in- 
cluding all food, clothing, shelter, etc.; whereas, in the 
deductions finally drawn from it, the term is used in its 
common and legitimate meaning of wealth devoted, not 
to the immediate gratification of desire, but to the pro- 
curement of more wealth — of wealth in the hands of em- 
ployers as distinguished from laborers. The conclusion 
is no more valid than it would be from the acceptance of 
the proposition that a laborer cannot go to work without 
his breakfast and some clothes, to infer that no more 
laborers can go to work than employers first furnish with 
breakfasts and clothes. Now, the fact is that laborers 
generally furnish their own breakfasts and the clothes in 
which they go to work; and the further fact is that 

than the portion so allotted (which is the capital of the country) cai? 
feed and provide with the materials and instruments of production. 
— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book I, Chap, 
V, Sec. L 



58 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Booh L 

capital (in the sense in which the word is used in distinc- 
tion to labor) in exceptional cases sometimes may, but is 
never compelled to make advances to labor before the 
work begins. Of all the vast number of unemployed 
laborers in the civilized world to-day, there is probably 
not a single one willing to work who could not be em- 
ployed without any advance of wages. A great propor- 
tion would doubtless gladly go to work on terms which 
did not require the payment of wages before the end of 
a month; it is doubtful if there are enough to be called 
a class who would not go to work and wait for their 
wages until the end of the week, as most laborers habit- 
ually do; while there are certainly none who would not 
wait for their wages until the end of the day, or if you 
please, until the next meal hour. The precise time of 
the payment of wages is immaterial; the essential point 
— the point I lay stress on — is that it is after the per- 
formance of work. 

The payment of wages, therefore, always implies the 
previous rendering of labor. Now, what does the render- 
ing of labor in production imply? Evidently the produc- 
tion of wealth, which, if it is to be exchanged or used in 
production, is capital. Therefore, the payment of capi- 
tal in wages pre-supposes a production of capital by the 
labor for which the wages are paid. And as the em- 
ployer generally makes a profit, the payment of wages is, 
so far as he is concerned, but the return to the laborer 
of a portion of the capital he has received from the labor. 
So far as the employee is concerned, it is but the receipt 
of a portion of the capital his labor has previously pro- 
duced. As the value paid in the wages is thus exchanged 
for a value brought into being by the labor, how can it 
be said that wages are drawn from capital or advanced by 
capital? As in the exchange of labor for wages the em- 
ployer always gets the capital created by the labor before 



Chap. III. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 59 

he pays out capital in the wages, at what point is his 
capital lessened even temporarily? * 

Bring the question to the test of facts. Take, for in- 
stance, an employing manufacturer who is engaged in 
turning raw material into finished products — cotton into 
cloth, iron into hardware, leather into boots, or so on, as 
may be, and who pays his hands, as is generally the case, 
once a week. Make an exact inventory of his capital on 
Monday morning before the beginning of work, and it 
will consist of his buildings, machinery, raw materials, 
money on hand, and finished products in stock. Sup- 
pose, for the sake of simplicity, that he neither buys nor 
sells during the week, and after work has stopped and he 
has paid his hands on Saturday night, take a new inven- 
tory of his capital. The item of money will be less, for 
it has been paid out in wages; there will be less raw 
material, less coal, etc., and a proper deduction must be 
made from the value of the buildings and machinery for 
the week's wear and tear. But if he is doing a remuner- 
ative business, which must on the average be the case, 
the item of finished products will be so much greater as 
to compensate for all these deficiencies and show in the 
summing up an increase of capital. Manifestly, then, 
the value he paid his hands in wages was not drawn from 

* I speak of labor producing capital for the sake of greater clearness. 
What labor always procures is either wealth, which may or may not 
be capital, or services, the cases in which nothing is obtained being 
merely exceptional cases of misadventure. Where the object of the 
labor is simply the gratification of the employer, as where I hire a 
man to black my boots, I do not pay the wages from capital, but 
from wealth which I have devoted, not to reproductive uses, but to 
consumption for my own satisfaction. Even if wages thus paid be 
considered as drawn from capital, then by that act they pass from 
the category of capital to that of wealth devoted to the gratification 
of the possessor, as when a cigar dealer takes a dozen cigars from 
the stock he has for sale and puts them in his pocket for his own 
use. 



60 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I 

his capital, or from any one else's capital. It came, not 
from capital, but from the value created by the labor 
itself. There was no more advance of capital than if he 
had hired his hands to dig clams, and paid them with a 
part of the clams they dug. Their wages were as truly 
the produce of their labor as were the wages of the 
primitive man, when, long "before the appropriation of 
land and the accumulation of stock/' he obtained an 
oyster by knocking it with a stone from the rocks. 

As the laborer who works for an employer does not get 
his wages until he has performed the work, his case is 
similar to that of the depositor in a bank who cannot 
draw money out until he has put money in. And as by 
drawing out what he has previously put in, the bank de- 
positor does not lessen the capital of the bank, neither 
can laborers by receiving wages lessen even temporarily 
either the capital of the employer or the aggregate capi- 
tal of the community. Their wages no more come from 
capital than the checks of depositors are drawn against 
bank capital. It is true that laborers in receiving wages 
do not generally receive back wealth in the same form in 
which they have rendered it, any more than bank deposi- 
tors receive back the identical coins or bank notes they 
have deposited, but they receive it in equivalent form, 
and as we are justified in saying that the depositor re- 
ceives from the bank the money he paid in, so are we 
justified in saying that the laborer receives in wages the 
wealth he has rendered in labor. 

That this universal truth is so often obscured, is 
largely due to that fruitful source of economic obscuri- 
ties, the confounding of wealth with money; and it is re- 
markable to see so many of those who, since Dr. Adam 
Smith made the egg stand on its head, have copiously 
demonstrated the fallacies of the mercantile system, fall 
into delusions of the very same kind in treating of the 
relations of capital and labor. Money being the general 



Chap. III. WAGES XOT DRAWK FROM CAPITAL. 61 

medium of exchanges, the common flux through which 
all transmutations of wealth from one form to another 
bake place, whatever difficulties may exist to an exchange 
will generally show themselves on the side of reduction 
to money, and thus it is sometimes easier to exchange 
money for any other form of wealth than it is to ex- 
change wealth in a particular form into money, for the 
reason that there are more holders of wealth who desire 
to make some exchange than there are who desire to 
make any particular exchange. And so a producing em- 
ployer who has paid out his money in wages may some- 
times find it difficult to turn quickly back into money 
the increased value for which his money has really been 
exchanged, and is spoken of as having exhausted or ad- 
vanced his capital in the payment of wages. Yet, unless 
the new value created by the labor is less than the wages 
paid, which can be only an exceptional case, the capital 
which he had before in money he now has in goods — it 
has been changed in form, but not lessened. 

There is one branch of production in regard to which 
the confusions of thought which arise from the habit of 
estimating capital in money are least likely to occur, in- 
asmuch as its product is the general material and stand- 
ard of money. And it so happens that this business fur- 
nishes us, almost side by side, with illustrations of pro- 
duction passing from the simplest to most complex 
forms. 

In the early days of California, as afterward in Aus- 
tralia, the placer miner, who found in river bed or sur- 
face deposit the glittering particles which the slow proc- 
esses of nature had for ages been accumulating, picked 
up or washed out his "wages" (so, too, he called them) 
in actual money, for coin being scarce, gold dust passed 
as currency by weight, and at the end of the day had his 
wages in money in a buckskin bag in his pocket. There 
can be no dispute as to whether these wages came from 



62 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I. 

capital or not. They were manifestly the produce of his 
labor. Nor could there be any dispute when the holder 
of a specially rich claim hired men to work for him and 
paid them off in the identical money which their labor 
had taken from gulch or bar. As coin became more 
abundant, its greater convenience in saving the trouble 
and loss of weighing assigned gold dust to the place of a 
commodity, and with coin obtained by the sale of the 
dust their labor had procured, the employing miner paid 
off his hands. Where he had coin enough to do so, in- 
stead of selling his gold dust at the nearest store and 
paying a dealer's profit, he retained it until he got 
enough to take a trip, or send by express to San Fran- 
cisco, where at the mint he could have it turned into 
coin without charge. While thus accumulating gold 
dust he was lessening his stock of coin; just as the man- 
ufacturer, while accumulating a stock of goods, lessens 
his stock of money. Yet no one would be obtuse enough 
to imagine that in thus taking in gold dust and paying 
out coin the miner was lessening his capital. 

But the deposits that could be worked without pre- 
liminary labor were soon exhausted, and gold mining 
rapidly took a more elaborate character. Before claims 
could be opened so as to yield any return deep shafts had 
to be sunk, great dams constructed, long tunnels cut 
through the hardest rock, water brought for miles over 
mountain ridges and across deep valleys, and expensive 
machinery put up. These works could not be con- 
structed without capital. Sometimes their construction 
required years, during which no return could be hoped 
for, while the men employed had to be paid their wages 
every week, or every month. Surely, it will be said, in such 
cases, even if in no others, that wages do actually come 
from capital; are actually advanced by capital; and must 
necessarily lessen capital in their payment! Surely here, 



Chap. III. WAGES KOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 63 

at least, industry is limited by capital, for without capi- 
tal such works could not be carried on! Let us see: 

It is cases of this class that are always instanced as 
showing that wages are advanced from capital. For 
where wages are paid before the object of the labor is ob- 
tained, or is finished — as in agriculture, where plowing 
and sowing must precede by several months the harvest- 
ing of the crop; as in the erection of buildings, the con- 
struction of ships, railroads, canals, etc. — it is clear that 
the owners of the capital paid in wages cannot expect an 
immediate return, but, as the phrase is, must "outlay 
it," or "lie out of it" for a time, which sometimes 
amounts to many years. And hence, if first principle? 
are not kept in mind, it is easy to jump to the conclusion 
that wages are advanced by capital. 

But such cases will not embarrass the reader to whom 
in what has preceded I have made myself clearly under- 
stood. An easy analysis wiK show that these instances 
where wages are paid before the product is finished, or 
even produced, do not afford any exception to the rule 
apparent where the product is finished before wages are 
paid. 

If I go to a broker to exchange silver for gold, I lay 
down my silver, which he counts and puts away, and 
then hands me the equivalent in gold, minus his com- 
mission. Does the broker advance me any capital? 
Manifestly not. What he had before in gold he now has 
in silver, plus his profit. And as he got the silver before 
he paid out the gold, there is on his part not even mo- 
mentarily an advance of capital. 

Now, this operation of the broker is precisely analo- 
gous to what the capitalist does, when, in such cases as we 
are now considering, he pays out capital in wages. As 
the rendering of labor precedes the payment of wages, 
and as the rendering of labor in production implies the 



64 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I 

creation of value, the employer receives value before he 
pays out value — he but exchanges capital of one form for 
capital of another form. For the creation of value does 
not depend upon the finishing of the product; it takes 
place at every stage of the process of production, as the 
immediate result of the application of labor, and hence, 
no matter how long the process in which it is engaged, 
labor always adds to capital by its exertion before it takes 
from capital in its wages. 

Here is a blacksmith at his forge making picks. 
Clearly he is making capital — adding picks to his em- 
ployer's capital before he draws money from it in wages. 
Here is a machinist or boilermaker working on the keel- 
plates of a Great Eastern. Is not he also just as clearly 
creating value — making capital? The giant steamship, 
as the pick, is an article of wealth, an instrument of pro- 
duction, and though the one may not be completed for 
years, while the other is completed in a few minutes, 
each day's work, in the one case as in the other, is as 
clearly a production of wealth — an addition to capital. 
In the case of the steamship, as in the case of the pick, it 
is not the last blow, any more than the first blow, that 
creates the value of the finished product — the creation 
of value is continuous, it immediately results from the 
exertion of labor. 

We see this very clearly wherever the division of labor 
has made it customary for different parts of the full 
process of production to be carried on by different sets 
of producers — that is to say, wherever we are in the habit 
of estimating the amount of value which the labor ex- 
pended in any preparatory stage of production has 
created. And a moment's reflection will show that this 
is the case as to the vast majority of products. Take a 
ship, a building, a jack-knife, a book, a lady's thimble or 
a loaf of bread. They are finished products. But they 
were not produced at one operation or by one set of pr<,- 



Chap. III. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 65 

ducers. And this being the case, we readily distinguish 
different points or stages in the creation of the value 
which as completed articles they represent. When wo 
do not distinguish different parts in the final process of 
production we do distinguish the value of the materials. 
The value of these materials may often be again decom- 
posed many times, exhibiting as many clearly defined 
steps in the creation of the final value. At each of these 
steps we habitually estimate a creation of value, an ad- 
dition to capital. The batch of bread which the baker is 
taking from the oven has a certain value. But this is 
composed in part of the value of the flour from which the 
dough was made. And this again is composed of the 
value of the wheat, the value given by milling, etc. 
Iron in the form of pigs is very far from being a com- 
pleted product. It must yet pass through several, or, 
perhaps, through many, stages of production before it 
results in the finished articles that were the ultimate ob- 
jects for which the iron ore was extracted from the mine. 
Yet, is not pig iron capital? And so the process of pro- 
duction is not really completed when a crop of cotton is 
gathered, nor yet when it is ginned and pressed; nor yet 
w r hen it arrives at Lowell or Manchester; nor yet when it 
is converted into yarn; nor yet when it becomes cloth; 
but only when it is finally placed in the hands of the 
consumer. Yet at each step in this progress there is 
clearly enough a creation of value — an addition to capital. 
Why, therefore, although we do not so habitually dis- 
tinguish and estimate it, is there not a creation of value 
— an addition to capital — when the ground is plowed for 
the crop? Is it because it may possibly be a bad season 
and the crop may fail? Evidently not; for a like possi- 
bility of misadventure attends every one of the many 
steps in the production of the finished article. On the 
average a crop is sure to come up, and so much plowing 
and sowing will on the average result in so much cotton 



66 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

in the boll, as surely as so much spinning of cotton yarn 
will result in so much cloth. 

In short, as the payment of wages is always condi- 
tioned upon the rendering of labor, the payment of 
wages in production, no matter how long the process, 
never involves any advance of capital, or even tempo- 
rarily lessens capital. It may take a year, or even years, 
to build a ship, but the creation of value of which the 
finished ship will be the sum goes on day by day, and 
hour by hour, from the time the keel is laid or even the 
ground is cleared. Nor by the payment of wages before 
the ship is completed, does the master builder lessen 
either his capital or the capital of the community, for 
the value of the partially completed ship stands in place 
of the value paid out in wages. There is no advance of 
capital in this payment of wages, for the labor of the 
workmen during the week or month creates and renders 
to the builder more capital than is paid back to them at 
the end of the week or month, as is shown by the fact 
that if the builder were at any stage of the construction 
asked to sell a partially completed ship he would expect 
a profit. 

And so, when a Sutro or St. Gothard tunnel or a 
Suez canal is cut, there is no advance of capital. The 
tunnel or canal, as it is cut, becomes capital as much as 
the money spent in cutting it — or, if you please, the 
powder, drills, etc., used in the work, and the food, 
clothes, etc., used by the workmen — as is shown by the 
fact that the value of the capital stock of the company is 
not lessened as capital in these forms is gradually 
changed into capital in the form of tunnel or canal. On 
the contrary, it probably, and on the average, increases 
as the work progresses, just as the capital invested in a 
speedier mode of production would on the average 
increase. 

And this is obvious in agriculture also. That the 



Chap. in. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 67 

creation of value does not take place all at once when 
the crop is gathered, but step by step during the whole 
process which the gathering of the crop concludes, and 
that no payment of wages in the interim lessens the 
farmer's capital, is tangible enough when land is sold or 
rented during the process of production, as a plowed field 
will bring more than an unplowed field, or a field that 
has been sown more than one merely plowed. It is 
tangible enough when growing crops are sold, as is some- 
times done, or where the farmer does not harvest him- 
self, but lets a contract to the owner of harvesting ma- 
chinery. It is tangible in the case of orchards and vine- 
yards which, though not yet in bearing, bring prices 
proportionate to their age. It is tangible in the case of 
horses, cattle and sheep, which increase in value as they 
grow toward maturity. And if not always tangible be- 
tween what may be called the usual exchange points in 
production, this increase of value as surely takes place 
with every exertion of labor. Hence, where labor is 
rendered before wages are paid, the advance of capital is 
really made by labor, and is from the employed to the 
employer, not from the employer to the employed. 

"Yet," it may be said, "in such cases as we have been 
considering capital is required!" Certainly; I do not 
dispute that. But it is not required in order to make 
advances to labor. It is required for quite another pur- 
pose. What that purpose is we may readily see. 

When wages are paid in kind — that is to say, in wealth 
of the same species as the labor produces; as, for in- 
stance, if I hire men to cut wood, agreeing to give them 
as wages a portion of the wood they cut, a method some- 
times adopted by the owners or lessees of woodland, it 
is evident that no capital is required for the payment of 
wages. Nor yet when, for the sake of mutual conven- 
ience, arising from the fact that a large quantity of wood 
can be more readily and more advantageously exchanged 



68 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I 

than a number of small quantities, I agree to pay wages 
in money, instead of wood, shall I need any capital, 
provided I can make the exchange of the wood for money 
before the wages are due. It is only when I cannot 
make such an exchange, or such an advantageous ex- 
change as I desire, until I accumulate a large quantity 
of wood that I shall need capital. Nor even then shall 
I need capital if I can make a partial or tentative ex- 
change by borrowing on my wood. If I cannot, or do 
not choose^ either to sell the wood or to borrow upon it, 
and yet wish to go ahead accumulating a large stock of 
wood, I shall need capital. But manifestly, I need this 
capital, not for the payment of wages, but for the accu- 
mulation of a stock of wood. Likewise in cutting a 
tunnel. If the workmen were paid in tunnel (which, if 
convenient, might easily be done by paying them in stock 
of the company), no capital for the payment of wages 
would be required. It is only when the undertakers 
wish to accumulate capital in the shape of a tunnel that 
they will need capital. To recur to our first illustration: 
The broker to whom I sell my silver cannot carry on 
his business without capital. But he does not need this 
capital because he makes any advance of capital to 
me when he receives my silver and hands me gold. He 
needs it because the nature of the business requires the 
keeping of a certain amount of capital on hand, in order 
that when a customer comes he may be prepared to make 
the exchange the customer desires. 

And so we shall find it in every branch of production. 
Capital has never to be set aside for the payment of 
wages when the produce of the labor for which the wages 
are paid is exchanged as soon as produced; it is only 
required when this produce is stored up, or what is to 
the individual the same thing, placed in the general cur- 
rent of exchanges without being at once drawn against— 
Jhat is, sold on credit. But the capital thus required ia 



Chcp.ni. WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL. 69 

not required for the payment of wages, nor for advances 
to labor, as it is always represented in the produce of the 
labor. It is never as an employer of labor that any pro- 
ducer needs capital; when he does need capital, it is be- 
cause he is not only an employer of labor, but a merchant 
or speculator in, or an accumulator of, the products of 
labor. This is generally the case with employers. 

To recapitulate: The man who works for himself gets 
his wages in the things he produces, as he produces them, 
and exchanges this value into another form whenever 
he sells the produce. The man who works for another 
for stipulated wages in money works under a contract of 
exchange. He also creates his wages as he renders his 
labor, but he does not get them except at stated times, 
in stated amounts, and in a different form. In perform- 
ing the labor he is advancing in exchange; when he gets 
his wages the exchange is completed. During the time 
he is earning the wages he is advancing capital to his 
employer, but at no time, unless wages are paid before 
work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him. 
Whether the employer who receives this produce in ex- 
change for the wages immediately re-exchanges it, or 
keeps it for awhile, no more alters the character of the 
transaction than does the final disposition of the product 
made by the ultimate receiver, who may, perhaps, be lit 
another quarter of the globe and at the end of a series oi 
exchanges numbering hundreds. 



CHAPTER IVo 

THE MAINTENANCE OF LABORERS NOT DRAWN FROM 

CAPITAL. 

But a stumbling block may yet remain, or may recur, 
in the mind of the reader. 

As the plowman cannot eat the furrow, nor a partially 
completed steam engine aid in any way in producing the 
clothes the machinist wears, have I not, in the words of 
John Stuart Mill, "forgotten that the people of a coun- 
try are maintained and have their wants supplied, not 
by the produce of present labor, but of past?" Or, to 
use the language of a popular elementary work — that of 
Mrs. Fawcett — have I not "forgotten that many 
months must elapse between the sowing of the seed and 
the time when the produce of that seed is converted into 
a loaf of bread," and that "it is, therefore, evident that 
laborers cannot live upon that which their labor is assist- 
ing to produce, but are maintained by that wealth which 
their labor, or the labor of others, has previously pro- 
duced, which wealth is capital?" * 

The assumption made in these passages — the assumption 
that it is so self-evident that labor must be subsisted from 
capital that the proposition has but to be stated to com- 
pel recognition — runs through the whole fabric of cur. 
rent political economy. And so confidently is it held 
that the maintenance of labor is drawn from capital that 

* Political Economy for Beginners, by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 
Chap. Ill, p. 25. 



Chap, TV LABORERS NOT MAINTAINED BY CAPITAL. 71 

the proposition that "population regulates itself by the 
funds which are to employ it, and, therefore, always in- 
creases or diminishes with the increase or diminution of 
capital," * is regarded as equally axiomatic, and in its 
turn made the basis of important reasoning. 

Yet being resolved, these propositions are seen to be, 
not self-evident, but absurd; for they involve the idea 
that labor cannot be exerted until the products of labor 
are saved — thus putting the product before the producer. 

And being examined, they will be seen to derive their 
apparent plausibility from a confusion of thought. 

I have already pointed out the fallacy, concealed by an 
erroneous definition, which underlies the proposition 
that because food, raiment and shelter are necessary to 
productive labor, therefore industry is limited by capital. 
To say that a man must have his breakfast before going 
to work is not to say that he cannot go to work unless a 
capitalist furnishes him with a breakfast, for his break- 
fast may, and in point of fact in any country where there 
is not actual famine will, come not from wealth set apart 
for the assistance of production, but from wealth set 
apart for subsistence. And, as has been previously shown, 
food, clothing, etc. — in short, all articles of wealth — are 
only capital so long as they remain in the possession of 
those who propose, not to consume, but to exchange 
them for other commodities or for productive services, 
and cease to be capital when they pass into the posses- 
sion of those who will consume them; for in that trans- 
action they pass from the stock of wealth held for the 
purpose of procuring other wealth, and pass into the 
stock of wealth held for purposes of gratification, irre- 
spective of whether their consumption will aid in the 
production of wealth or not. Unless this distinction is 
preserved it is impossible to draw the line between the 

* The words quoted are Ricardo's (Chap. II); but the idea is com- 
mon in standard works. 



72 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I 

wealth that is capital and the wealth that is not capital, 
even by remitting the distinction to the "mind of the 
possessor/' as does John Stuart Mill. For men do not 
eat or abstain, wear clothes or go naked, as they propose 
to engage in productive labor or not. They eat because 
they are hungry, and wear clothes because they would be 
uncomfortable without them. Take the food on the 
breakfast table of a laborer who will work or not that day 
as he gets the opportunity. If the distinction between 
capital and non-capital be the support of productive 
labor, is this food capital or not? It is as impossible for 
the laborer himself as for any philosopher of the Ricardo- 
Mill school to tell. Nor yet can it be told when it gets 
into his stomach; nor, supposing that he does not get 
work at first, but continues the search, can it be told 
until it has passed into the blood and tissues. Yet the 
man will eat his breakfast all the same. 

But, though it would be logically sufficient, it is hardly 
safe to rest here and leave the argument to turn on the 
distinction between wealth and capital. Nor is it neces- 
sary. It seems to me that the proposition that present 
labor must be maintained by the produce of past labor 
will upon analysis prove to be true only in the sense that 
the afternoon's labor must be performed by the aid of 
the noonday meal, or that before you eat the hare he 
must be caught and cooked. And this, manifestly, is 
not the sense in which the proposition is used to support 
the important reasoning that is made to hinge upon it. 
That sense is, that before a work which will not immedi- 
ately result in wealth available for subsistence can be 
carried on, there must exist such a stock of subsistence 
as will support the laborers during the process. Let us 
see if this be true: 

The canoe which Robinson Crusoe made with such in- 
finite toil and pains was a production in which his labor 
could not yield an immediate return. But was it neces- 



Chap. IV. LABORERS NOT MAINTAINED BY CAPITAL. 73 

sary that, before he commenced, he should accumulate a 
stock of food sufficient to maintain him while he felled 
the tree, hewed out the canoe, and finally launched her 
into the sea? Not at all. It was necessary only that he 
should dev.ote part of his time to the procurement of 
food while he was devoting part of his time to the build- 
ing and launching of the canoe. Or supposing a hun- 
dred men to be landed, without any stock of provisions, 
in a new country. Will it be necessary for them to ac- 
cumulate a season's stock of provisions before they can 
begin to cultivate the soil? Not at all. It will be neces- 
sary only that fish, game, berries, etc., shall be so abun- 
dant that the labor of a part of the hundred may suffice 
to furnish daily enough of these for the maintenance of 
all, and that there shall be such a sense of mutual 
interest, or such a correlation of desires, as shall lead 
those who in the present get the food to divide (ex- 
change) with those whose efforts are directed to future 
recompense. 

What is true in these cases is true in all cases. It is 
not necessary to the production of things that cannot be 
used as subsistence, or cannot be immediately utilized, 
that there should have been a previous production of the 
wealth required for the maintenance of the laborers 
while the production is going on. It is only necessary 
that there should be, somewhere within the circle of ex- 
change, a contemporaneous production 01 sufficient sub- 
sistence for the laborers, and a willingness to exchange 
this subsistence for the thing on which the labor is being 
bestowed. 

And as a matter of fact, is it not true, in any normal 
condition of things, that consumption is supported by 
contemporaneous production? 

Here is a luxurious idler, who does no productive work 
either with head or hand, but lives, we say, upon wealth 
which his father left him securely invested in govern- 



74 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book I 

ment bonds. Does his subsistence, as a matter of fact, 
come from wealth accumulated in the past or from the 
productive labor that is going on around him? On his 
table are new-laid eggs, butter churned but a few days 
before, milk which the cow gave this morning, fish which 
twenty-four hours ago were swimming in the sea, meat 
which the butcher boy has just brought in time to be 
cooked, vegetables fresh from the garden, and fruit from 
the orchard — in short, hardly anything that has not re- 
cently left the hand of the productive laborer (for in this 
category must be included transporters and distributors 
as well as those who are engaged in the first stages of 
production), and nothing that has been produced for any 
considerable length of time, unless it maybe some bottles 
of old wine. What this man inherited from his father, 
and on which we say he lives, is not actually wealth at 
all, but only the power of commanding wealth as others 
produce it. And it is from this contemporaneous pro- 
duction that his subsistence is drawn. 

The fifty square miles of London undoubtedly contain 
more wealth than within the same space anywhere else 
exists. Yet were productive labor in London absolutely 
to cease, within a few hours people would begin to 
die like rotten sheep, and within a few weeks, or at most 
a few months, hardly one would be left alive. For an 
entire suspension of productive labor would be a disaster 
more dreadful than ever yet befell a beleaguered city. It 
would not be a mere external wall of circumvallation, 
such as Titus drew around Jerusalem, which would pre- 
vent the constant incoming of the supplies on which a 
great city lives, but it would be the drawing of a similar 
wall around each household. Imagine such a suspension 
of labor in any community, and you will see how true it 
is that mankind really live from hand to mouth; that it 
is the daily labor of the community that supplies the 
community with its daily bread. 



Chap. IV. LABORERS NOT MAINTAINED BY CAPITAL. 75 

Just as the subsistence of the laborers who built the 
Pyramids was drawn not from a previously hoarded 
stock, but from the constantly recurring crops of the Nile 
Valley; just as a modern government when it undertakes 
a great work of years does not appropriate to it wealth 
already produced, but wealth yet to be produced, which 
is taken from producers in taxes as the work progresses; 
so it is that the subsistence of the laborers engaged in 
production which does not directly yield subsistence 
comes from the production of subsistence in which others 
are simultaneously engaged. 

If we trace the circle of exchange by which work done 
in the production of a great steam engine secures to the 
worker bread, meat, clothes and shelter, we shall find 
that though between the laborer on the engine and the 
producers of the bread, meat, etc., there may be a thou- 
sand intermediate exchanges, the transaction, when re- 
duced to its lowest terms, really amounts to an exchange 
of labor between him and them. Now the cause which 
induces the expenditure of the labor on the engine is 
evidently that some one who has power to give what is 
desired by the laborer on the engine wants in exchange 
an engine — that is to say, there exists a demand for an 
engine on the part of those producing bread, meat, etc., 
or on the part of those who are producing what the pro- 
ducers of the bread, meat, etc., desire. It is this demand 
which directs the labor of the machinist to the produc- 
tion of the engine, and hence, reversely, the demand of 
the machinist for bread, meat, etc., really directs an 
equivalent amount of labor to the production of these 
things, and thus his labor, actually exerted in the pro- 
duction of the engine, virtually produces the things in 
which he expends his wages. 

Or, to formularize this principle: 

TJie demand for consumption determines the direction in 
zvhich labor will be expended in production. 



76 WAGES AND CAPITAL. B*ok I 

This principle is so simple and obvious that it needs 
no further illustration, yet in its light all the complexi- 
ties of our subject disappear, and we thus reach the same 
view of the real objects and rewards of labor in the intri- 
cacies of modern production that we gained by observing 
in the first beginnings of society the simpler forms of 
production and exchange,, We see that now, as then, 
each laborer is endeavoring to obtain by his exertions the 
satisfaction of his own desires; we see that although the 
minute division of labor assigns to each producer the 
production of but a small part, or perhaps nothing at all, of 
the particular things he labors to get, yet, in aiding in the 
production of what other producers want, he is directing 
other labor to the production of the things he wants — in 
effect, producing them himself. And thus, if he make 
jack-knives and eat wheat, the wheat is really as much 
the produce of his labor as if he had grown it for himself 
and left wheat-growers to make their own jack-knives. 

We thus see how thoroughly and completely true it 
is, that in whatever is taken or consumed by laborers in 
return for labor rendered, there is no advance of capital 
to the laborers. If I have made jack-knives, and with 
the wages received have bought wheat, I have simply ex- 
changed jack-knives for wheat — added jack-knives to the 
existing stock of wealth and taken wheat from it. And 
as the demand for consumption determines the direction 
in which labor will be expended in production, it cannot 
even be said, so long as the limit of wheat production has 
not been reached, that I have lessened the stock of 
wheat, for, by placing jack-knives in the exchangeable 
stock of wealth and taking wheat out, I have determined 
labor at the other end of a series of exchanges to the pro- 
duction of wheat, just as the wheat grower, by putting in 
wheat and demanding jack-knives, determined labor to 
the production of jack-knives, as the easiest way by 
ivhich wheat could be obtained. 



Chap. IV. LABORERS NOT MAINTAINED BY CAPITAL. 7? 

And so the man who is following the plow — though 
the crop for which he is opening the ground is not yet 
sown, and after being sown will take months to arrive at 
maturity — he is yet, by the exertion of his labor in plow- 
ing, virtually producing the food he eats and the wages 
he receives. For, though plowing is but a part of the 
operation of producing a crop, it is a part, and as neces- 
sary a part as harvesting. The doing of it is a step to- 
ward procuring a crop, which, by the assurance which it 
gives of the future crop, sets free from the stock con- 
stantly held the subsistence and wages of the plowman. 
This is not merely theoretically true, it is practically and 
literally true. At the proper time for plowing, let plow- 
ing cease. Would not the symptoms of scarcity at once 
manifest themselves without waiting for the time of the 
harvest? Let plowing cease, and would not the effect at 
once be felt in counting-room, and machine shop, and 
factory? Would not loom and spindle soon stand as idle 
as the plow? That this would be so, we see in the effect 
which immediately follows a bad season. And if this 
would be so, is not the man who plows really producing 
his subsistence and wages as much as though during the 
day or week his labor actually resulted in the things for 
which his labor is exchanged ? 

As a matter of fact, where there is labor looking for 
employment, the want of capital does not prevent the 
owner of land which promises a crop for which there is a 
demand from hiring it. Either he makes an agreement 
to cultivate on shares, a common method in some parts 
of the United States, in which case the laborers, if they 
are without means of subsistence, will, on the strength 
of the work they are doing, obtain credit at the nearest 
store; or, if he prefers to pay wages, the farmer will him- 
self obtain credit, and thus the work done in cultivation 
is immediately utilized or exchanged as it is done. If 
anything more will be used up than would be used up if 



78 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

the laborers were forced to beg instead of to work (for in 
any civilized country during a normal condition of things 
the laborers must be supported anyhow), it will be the re- 
serve capital drawn out by the prospect of replacement, and 
which is in fact replaced by the work as it is done. For 
instance, in the purely agricultural districts of Southern 
California there was in 1877 a total failure of the crop, 
and of millions of sheep nothing remained but their 
bones. In the great San Joaquin Valley were many 
farmers without food enough to support their families 
until the next harvest time, let alone to support any 
laborers. But the rains came again in proper season, 
and these very farmers proceeded to hire hands to plow 
and to sow. For every here and there was a farmer who 
had been holding back part of his crop. As soon as the 
rains came he was anxious to sell before the next harvest 
brought lower prices, and the grain thus held in reserve, 
through the machinery of exchanges and advances, 
passed to the use of the cultivators — set free, in effect 
produced, by the work done for the next crop. 

The series of exchanges which unite production and 
consumption may be likened to a curved pipe filled with 
water. If a quantity of water is poured in at one end, a 
like quantity is released at the other. It is not iden- 
tically the same water, but is its equivalenc. And so 
they who do the work of production put in as they take 
out — they receive in subsistence and wages but the prod- 
uce of their labor. 



CHAPTEE Vo 

THE REAL FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL. 

It may now be asked, If capital is not required for the 
payment of wages or the support of labor during produc- 
tion, what, then, are its functions? 

The previous examination has made the answer clear. 
Capital, as we have seen, consists of wealth used for the 
procurement of more wealth, as distinguished from 
wealth used for the direct satisfaction of desire; or, as I 
think it may be defined, of wealth in the course oi 
exchange. 

Capital, therefore, increases the power of labor to pro- 
duce wealth: (1) By enabling labor to apply itself in 
more effective ways, as by digging up clams with a spade 
instead of the hand, or moving a vessel by shoveling coal 
into a furnace, instead of tugging at an oar. (2) By en- 
abling labor to avail itself of the reproductive forces of 
nature, as to obtain corn by sowing it, or animals by 
breeding them. (3) By permitting the division of labor, 
and thus, on the one hand, increasing the efficiency of 
the human factor of wealth, by the utilizatiou of special 
capabilities, the acquisition of skill, and the reduction of 
waste; and, on the other, calling in the powers of the 
natural factor at their highest, by taking advantage of 
the diversities of 'soil, climate and situation, so as to ob- 
tain each particular species of wealth where nature is 
most favorable to its production. 

Capital does not supply the materials which labor 
works up into wealth, as is erroneously taught; the ma- 



80 WAGES AXD CAPITAL. Booh X 

terials of wealth are supplied by nature. But such ma- 
terials partially worked up and in the course of exchange 
are capital. 

Capital does not supply or advance wages, as is erro- 
neously taught. Wages are that part of the produce of 
his labor obtained by the laborer. 

Capital does not maintain laborers during the progress 
of their work, as is erroneously taught. Laborers are 
maintained by their labor, the man who produces, in 
whole or in part, anything that will exchange for articles 
of maintenance, virtually producing that maintenance. 

Capital, therefore, does not limit industry, as is erro- 
neouly taught, the only limit to industry being the access 
to natural material. But capital may limit the form of 
industry and the productiveness of industry, by limiting 
the use of tools and the division of labor. 

That capital may limit the form of industry is clear. 
Without the factory, there could be no factory opera- 
tives; without the sewing machine, no machine sewing; 
without the plow, no plowman; and without a great capi- 
tal engaged in exchange, industry could not take the 
many special forms which are concerned with exchanges. 
It is also as clear that the want of tools must greatly 
limit the productiveness of industry. If the farmer 
must use the spade because he has not capital enough for 
a plow, the sickle instead of the reaping machine, the 
flail instead of the thresher; if the machinist must rely 
upon the chisel for cutting iron; the weaver on the hand 
loom, and so on, the productiveness of industry cannot 
be a tithe of what it is when aided by capital in the shape 
of the best tools now in use. Nor could the division of 
labor go further than the very rudest and almost imper- 
ceptible beginnings, nor the exchanges which make it 
possible extend beyond the nearest neighbors, unless a 
portion of the things produced were constantly kept in 
stock or in transit. Even the pursuits of hunting, 



Chap.V. THE REAL FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL. 81 

fishing, gathering nuts, and making weapons could not 
be specialized so that an individual could devote himself 
to any one, unless some part of what was procured by each 
was reserved from immediate consumption, so that he 
who devoted himself to the procurement of things of one 
kind could obtain the others as he wanted them, and 
could make the good luck of one day supply the short- 
comings of the next. While to permit the minute sub- 
division of labor that is characteristic of, and necessary to, 
high civilization, a great amount of wealth of all descrip- 
tions must be constantly kept in stock or in transit. To 
enable the resident of a civilized community to exchange 
his labor at option with the labor of those around him 
and with the labor of men in the most remote parts of 
the globe, there must be stocks of goods in warehouses, 
m stores, in the holds of ships, and in railway cars, just 
as to enable the denizen of a great city to draw at will 
a cupful of water, there must be thousands of millions 
of gallons stored in reservoirs and moving through miles 
of pipe. 

But to say that capital may limit the form of industry 
or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing 
from saying that capital limits industry. For the dictum 
of the current political economy that "capital limits in- 
dustry," means not that capital limits the form of labor 
or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the ex- 
ertion of labor. This proposition derives its plausibility 
from the assumption that capital supplies labor with ma- 
terials and maintenance — an assumption that we have 
seen to be unfounded, and which is indeed transparently 
preposterous the moment it is remembered that capital is 
produced by labor, and hence that there must be labor 
before there can be capital. Capital may limit the form 
of industry and the productiveness of industry; but this 
is not to say that there could be no industry without capi- 
tal, any more than it is to say that without the power 



82 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Book L 

loom there could be no weaving; without the sewing 
machine no sewing; no cultivation without the plow; or 
that in a community of one, like that of Eobinson 
Crusoe, there could be no labor because there could be 
no exchange. 

And to say that capital may limit the form and pro- 
ductiveness of industry is a different thing from saying 
that capital does. For the cases in which it can be truly 
said that the form of productiveness of the industry of a 
community is limited by its capital, will, I think, appear 
upon examination to be more theoretical than real. It is 
evident that in such a country as Mexico or Tunis the 
larger and more general use of capital would greatly 
change the forms of industry and enormously increase 
its productiveness; and it is often said of such countries 
that they need capital for the development of their re- 
sources. But is there not something back of this — a 
want which includes the want of capital? Is it not the 
rapacity and abuses of government, the insecurity of 
property, the ignorance and prejudice of the people, that 
prevent the accumulation and use of capital? Is not 
the real limitation in these things, and not in the want 
of capital, which would not be used even if placed there? 
We can, of course, imagine a community in which the 
want of capital would be the only obstacle to an increased 
productiveness of labor, but it is only by imagining a 
conjunction of conditions that seldom, if ever, occurs, 
except by accident or as a passing phase. A community 
in which capital has been swept away by war, conflagra- 
tion, or convulsion Of nature, and, possibly, a community 
composed of civilized people just settled in a new land, 
seem to me to furnish the only examples. Yet how 
quickly the capital habitually used is reproduced in a 
community that has been swept by war, has long been 
noticed, while the rapid production of the capital it can, 



Chap. T. THE REaL FUKCTIOKS OF CAPITAL. 83 

or is disposed to use, is equally noticeable in the case of 
a new community. 

I am unable to think of any other than such rare and 
passing conditions in which the productiveness of labor 
is really limited by the want of capital. For, although 
there may be in a community individuals who from want 
of capital cannot apply their labor as efficiently as they 
would, yet so long as there is a sufficiency of capital in the 
community at large, the real limitation is not the want of 
capital, but the want of its proper distribution. If bad 
government rob the laborer of his capital, if unjust laws 
take from the producer the wealth with which he would 
assist production, and hand it over to those who are mere 
pensioners upon industry, the real limitation to the 
effectiveness of labor is in misgovernment, and not in 
want of capital. And so of ignorance, or custom, or 
other conditions which prevent the use of capital. It is 
they, not the want of capital, that really constitute the 
limitation. To give a circular saw to a Terra del 
Fuegan, a locomotive to a Bedouin Arab, or a sewing 
machine to a Flathead squaw, would not be to add to the 
efficiency of their labor. Neither does it seem possible 
by giving anything else to add to their capital, for any 
wealth beyond what they had been accustomed to use as 
capital would be consumed or suffered to waste. It is 
not the want of seeds and tools that keeps the Apache 
and the Sioux from cultivating the soil. If provided 
with seeds and tools they would not use them produc- 
tively unless at the same time restrained from wandering 
and taught to cultivate the soil. If all the capital of a 
London were given them in their present condition, it 
would simply cease to be capital, for they would only use 
productively such infinitesimal part as might assist in 
the chase, and would not even use that until all the 
edible part of the stock thus showered upon them had 
been consumed. Yet such capital as they do want 



34- WAGES AND CAPITAL. Boo't l 

they manage to acquire, and in some forms in spite of 
the greatest difficulties. These wild tribes hunt and 
fight with the best weapons that American and English 
factories produce, keeping up with the latest improve- 
ments. It is only as they became civilized that they 
would care for such other capital as the civilized state 
requires, or that it would be of any use to them. 

In the reign of George IV., some returning mission- 
aries took with them to England a New Zealand chief 
called Hongi. His noble appearance and beautiful 
tatooing attracted much attention, and when about to 
return to his people he was presented by the monarch 
and some of the religious societies with a considerable 
stock of tools, agricultural instruments, and seeds. 
The grateful New Zealander did use this capital in the 
production of food, but it was in a manner of which his 
English entertainers little dreamed. In Sydney, on his 
way back, he exchanged it all for arms and ammunition, 
with which, on getting home, he began war against an- 
other tribe with such success that on the first battle field 
three hundred of his prisoners were cooked and eaten, 
Hongi having preluded the main repast by scooping out 
and swallowing the eyes and sucking the warm blood of 
his mortally wounded adversary, the opposing chief.* 
But now that their once constant wars have ceased, and 
the remnant of the Maoris have largely adopted European 
habits, there are among them many who have and use 
considerable amounts of capital. 

Likewise it would be a mistake to attribute the simple 
modes of production and exchange which are resorted to 
in new communities solely to a want of capital. These 
modes, which require little capital, are in themselves 
rude and inefficient, but when the conditions of such 

* New Zealand and its Inhabitants. Rev. Richard Taylor. Lon 
don, 1855. Chap. XXI. 



Chap. V. THE REAL FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL. 85 

communities are considered, they will be found in reality 
the most effective A great factory with all the latest 
improvements is the most efficient instrument that has 
yet been devised for turning wool or cotton into cloth, 
but only so where large quantities are to be made. The 
cloth required for a little village could be made with far 
less labor by the spinning wheel and hand loom. A 
perfecting press will, for each man required, print many 
thousand impressions while a man and a boy would be 
printing a hundred with a Stanhope or Franklin press; 
yet to work off the small edition of a country newspaper 
the old-fashioned press is by far the most efficient ma- 
chine. To carry occasionally two or three passengers, a 
canoe is a better instrument than a steamboat; a few 
sacks of flour can be transported with less expenditure 
of labor by a pack horse than by a railroad train; to put 
a great stock of goods into a cross-roads store in the 
backwoods would be but to waste capital. And, gener- 
ally, it will be found that the rude devices of production 
and exchange which obtain among the sparse populations 
of new countries result not so much from the want of 
capital as from inability profitably to employ it. 

As, no matter how much water is poured in, there can 
never be in a bucket more than a bucketful, so no 
greater amount of wealth will be used as capital than is 
required by the machinery of production and exchange 
that under all the existing conditions — intelligence, 
habit, security, density of population, etc. — best suit the 
people. And I am inclined to think that as a general 
rule this amount will be had — that the social organism 
secretes, as it were, the necessary amount of capital just 
as the human organism in a healthy condition secretes 
the requisite fat. 

But whether the amount of capital ever does limit the 
productiveness of industry, and thus fix a maximum 
which wages cannot exceed, it is evident that it is not 



86 WAGES AND CAPITAL. Booh I 

from any scarcity of capital that the poverty of the 
masses in civilized countries proceeds. For not only do 
wages nowhere reach the limit fixed by the productive- 
ness of industry, but wages are relatively the lowest 
where capital is most abundant. The tools and machin- 
ery of production are in all the most progressive coun- 
tries evidently in excess of the use made of them, and 
any prospect of remunerative employment brings out 
more than the capital needed. The bucket is not only 
full; it is overflowing. So evident is this, that not only 
among the ignorant, but by men of high economic repu- 
tation, is industrial depression attributed to the abun- 
dance of machinery and the accumulation of capital; 
and war, which is the destruction of capital, is looked 
upon as the cause of brisk trade and high wages — an idea 
strangely enough, so great is the confusion of thought 
on such matters, countenanced by many who hold that 
capital employs labor and pays wages. 



Our purpose in this inquiry is to solve the problem to 
which so many self-contradictory answers are given. In 
ascertaining clearly what capital really is and what capi- 
tal really does, we have made the first, and an all-impor- 
tant step. But it is only a first step. Let us recapitulate 
and proceed. 

We have seen that the current theory that wages de- 
pend upon the ratio between the number of laborers and 
the amount of capital devoted to the employment of 
labor is inconsistent with the general fact that wages and 
interest do not rise and fall inversely, but conjointly. 

This discrepancy having led us to an examination of 
the grounds of the theory, we have seen, further, that, 
contrary to the current idea, wages are not drawn from 
capital at all, but come directly from the produce of the 
labor for which they are paid. We have seen that capi- 



Chap. V. RECAPITULATION 87 

tal does liot advance wages or subsist laborers, but that 
its functions are to assist labor in production with tools, 
seed, etc., and with the wealth required to carry on ex- 
changes. 

We are thus irresistibly led to practical conclusions so 
important as amply to justify the pains taken to make 
sure of them. 

For if wages aro drawn, not from capital, but from the 
produce of labor, the current theories as to the relations 
of capital and labor are invalid, and all remedies, whether 
proposed by professors of political economy or working- 
men, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by 
the increase of capital or the restriction of the number 
of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be con- 
demned. 

If each laborer in performing the labor really creates 
the fund from which his wages are drawn, then wages 
cannot be diminished by the increase of laborers, but, on 
the contrary, as the efficiency of labor manifestly increases 
with the number of laborers, the more laborers, other 
things being equal, the higher should wages be. 

But this necessary proviso, "other things being equal," 
brings us to a question which must be considered and 
disposed of before we can further proceed. That ques- 
tion is, Do the productive powers of nature tend to 
diminish with the increasing drafts made upon them by 
increasing population? 



BOOK II. 

POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. 



CHAPTER I. — THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY, ITS GENESIS 

AND SUPPORT. 
CHAPTER II.— INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 
CHAPTER III. — INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 
CHAPTER IV. — DISPROOF OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 



Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, 

So careless of the single life. 

— Tennyson 



CHAPTER I. 

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY, ITS GENESIS AND SUPPORT. 

Behind the theory we have been considering lies a 
theory we have yet to consider. The current doctrine as 
to the derivation and law of wages finds its strongest 
support in a doctrine as generally accepted — the doctrine 
to which Malthus has given his name — that population 
naturally tends to increase faster than subsistence. 
These two doctrines, fitting in with each other, frame 
the answer which the current political economy gives to 
the great problem we are endeavoring to solve. 

In what has preceded, the current doctrine that wage? 
are determined by the ratio between capital and laborers 
has, I think, been shown to be so utterly baseless as to 
excite surprise as to how it could so generally and so 
long obtain. It is not to be wondered at that such a 
theory should have arisen in a state of society where the 
great body of laborers seem to depend for employment 
and wages upon a separate class of capitalists, nor yet 
that under these conditions it should have maintained 
itself among the masses of men, who rarely take the 
trouble to separate the real from the apparent. But it 
is surprising that a theory which on examination appears 
to be so groundless could have been successively accepted 
by so many acute thinkers as have during the present 
century devoted their powers to the elucidation and 
development of the science of political economy. 

The explanation of this otherwise unaccountable fact 
is to be found in the general acceptance of the Malthu- 
sian theory. The current theory of wages has never 
been fairly put upon its trial, because, backed by the 



92 POPULATION AXD SUBSISTENCE. Book IL 

Malthusian theory, it has seemed in the minds of polit- 
ical economists a self-evident truth. These two theories 
mutually blend with, strengthen, and defend each other, 
while they both derive additional support from a princi- 
ple brought prominently forward in the discussions of 
the theory of rent — viz., that past a certain point the 
application of capital and labor to land yields a diminish- 
ing return. Together they give such an explanation of 
the phenomena presented in a highly organized and 
advancing society as seems to fit all the facts, and which 
has thus prevented closer investigation. 

Which of these two theories is entitled to historical 
precedence it is hard to say. The theory of population 
was not formulated in such a way as to give it the stand- 
ing of a scientific dogma until after that had been done 
for the theory of wages. But they naturally spring up 
and grow with each other, and were both held in a form 
more or less crude long prior to any attempt to construct 
a system of political economy. It is evident, from several 
passages, that though he never fully developed it, the 
Malthusian theory was in rudimentary form present in 
the mind of Adam Smith, and to this, it seems to me, 
must be largely due the misdirection which on the sub- 
ject of wages his speculations took. But, however this 
may be, so closely are the two theories connected, so 
completely do they complement each other, that Buckle, 
reviewing the history of the development of political 
economy in his "Examination of the Scotch Intellect 
during the Eighteenth Century/' attributes mainly to 
Malthus the honor of "decisively proving" the current 
theory of wages by advancing the current theory of the 
pressure of population upon subsistence. He says in 
his "History of Civilization in England," Vol. 3, Chap. 5: 

" Scarcely had the Eighteenth Century passed away when it was 
decisively proved that the reward of labor depends solely on two 
things; namely, the magnitude of that national fund out of which 



Chap. 1. THE MALTHUSIAX THEORY. 93 

all labor is paid, and the number of laborers among whom the fund 
is to be divided. This vast step in our knowledge is due, mainly, 
though not entirely, to Malthus, whose work on population, besides 
marking an epoch in the history of speculative thought, has already 
produced considerable practical results, and will probably give rise 
to others more considerable still. It was published in 1798; so that 
Adam Smith, who died in 1790, missed what to him would have 
been the intense pleasure of seeing how, in it, his own views were 
expanded rather than corrected. Indeed, it is certain that without 
Smith there would have been no Malthus; that is, unless Smith had 
laid the foundation, Malthus could not have raised the super- 
structure/' 

The famous doctrine which ever since its enunciation 
has so powerfully influenced thought, not alone in the 
province of political economy, but in regions of even 
higher speculation, was formulated by Malthus in the 
proposition that, as shown by the growth of the North 
American colonies, the natural tendency of population 
is to double itself at least every twenty-five years, thus 
increasing in a geometrical ratio, while the subsistence 
that can be obtained from land "under circumstances 
the most favorable to human industry could not possibly 
be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio, 
or by an addition every twenty-five years of a quantity 
equal to what it at present produces." "The necessary 
effects of these two different rates of increase, when 
brought together," Mr. Malthus naively goes on to say, 
"will be very striking." And thus (Chap. I) he brings 
them together: 

"Let us call the population of this island eleven millions; and 
suppose the present produce equal to the easy support of such a 
number. In the first twenty-five years the population would be 
twenty-two millions, and the food being also doubled, the means of 
subsistence would be equal to this increase. In the next twenty -five 
years the population would be forty-four millions, and the means of 
subsistance only equal to the support of thirty-three millions. In 
the next period the population would be equal to eighty-eight mil- 
lions, and the means of subsistence just equal to the support of half 



94 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

that number. And at the conclusion of the first century, the popu- 
lation would be a hundred and seventy-six millions, and the means of 
subsistence only equal to the support of fifty-five millions; leaving a 
population of a hundred and twenty-one millions totally unprovided 
for. 

"Taking the whole earth instead of this island, emigration would 
of course be excluded; and supposing the present population equal 
to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the 
numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 
6, 7, 8, 9. In two centuries the population would be to the means 
of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries, 4,096 to 13, and in two 
thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable/' 

Such a result is of course prevented by the physical 
fact that no more people can exist than can find subsist- 
ence, and hence Malthus' conclusion is, that this ten- 
dency of population to indefinite increase must be held 
back either by moral restraint upon the reproductive 
faculty, or by the various causes which increase mortality, 
which he resolves into vice and misery. Such causes as 
prevent propagation he styles the preventive check; 
such causes as increase mortality he styles the positive 
check. This is the famous Malthusian doctrine, as 
promulgated by Malthus himself in the "Essay on Popu- 
lation." 

It is not worth while to dwell upon the fallacy in- 
volved in the assumption of geometrical and arithmetical 
rates of increase, a play upon proportions which hardly 
rises to the dignity of that in the familiar puzzle of the 
hare and the tortoise, in which the hare is made to chase 
the tortoise through all eternity without coming up with 
him. For this assumption is not necessary to the Mal- 
thusian doctrine, or at least is expressly repudiated by 
some of those who fully accept that doctrine; as, for in- 
stance, John Stuart Mill, who speaks of it as "an un- 
lucky attempt to give precision to things which do not 
admit of it, which every person capable of reasoning 



Chap. L THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 95 

must see is wholly superfluous to the argument." * The 
essence of the Malthusian doctrine is, that population 
tends to increase faster than the power of providing food, 
and whether this difference be stated as a geometrical 
ratio for population and an arithmetical ratio for subsist- 
ence, as by Malthus; or as a constant ratio for popula- 
tion and a diminishing ratio for subsistence, as by Mill, 
is only a matter of statement. The vital point, on 
which both agree, is, to use the words of Mathus, "that 
there is a natural tendency and constant effort in popu- 
lation to increase beyond the means of subsistence." 

The Malthusian doctrine, as at present held, may be 
thus stated in its strongest and least objectionable form: 

That population, constantly tending to increase, must, 
when unrestrained, ultimately press against the limits of 
subsistence, not as against a fixed, but as against an 
elastic barrier, which makes the procurement of subsist- 
ence progressively more and more difficult. And thus, 
wherever reproduction has had time to assert its power, 
and is unchecked by prudence, there must exist that de- 
gree of want which will keep population within the 
bounds of subsistence. 

Although in reality not more repugnant to the sense 
of harmonious adaptation by creative beneficence and wis- 
dom than the complacent no-theory which throws the 
responsibility for poverty and its concomitants upon the 
inscrutable decrees of Providence, without attempting to 
trace them, this theory, in avowedly making vice and 
suffering the necessary results of a natural instinct with 

* Principles of Political Economy, Book II, Chap. IX., Sec. VI. 
~- Yet notwithstanding what Mill says, it is clear that Malthus him- 
self lays great stress upon his geometrical and arithmetical ratios, 
and it is also probable that it is to these ratios that Malthus is largely 
indebted for his fame, as they supplied one of those high-sounding 
formulas that with many people carry far more weight than the 
dearest reasoning. 



96 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Booh II 

wliich are linked the purest and sweetest affections,, 
comes rudely in collision with ideas deeply rooted in the 
human mind, and it was, as soon as formally promul- 
gated, fought with a bitterness in which zeal was often 
more manifest than logic. But it has triumphantly 
withstood the ordeal, and in spite of the refutations of 
the Godwins, the denunciations of the Cobbetts, and all 
the shafts that argument, sarcasm, ridicule, and senti- 
ment could direct against it, to-day it stands in the world 
of thought as an accepted truth, which compels the 
recognition even of those who would fain disbelieve it. 

The causes of its triumph, the sources of its strength, 
are not obscure. Seemingly backed by an indisputable 
arithmetical truth — that a continuously increasing popu- 
lation must eventually exceed the capacity of the earth 
to furnish food or even standing room, the Malthusian 
theory is supported by analogies in the animal and vege- 
table kingdoms, where life everywhere beats wastefully 
against the barriers that hold its different species in 
check — analogies to which the course of modern thought, 
in leveling distinctions between different forms of life, 
has given a greater and greater weight; and it is appar- 
ently corroborated by many obvious facts, such as the 
prevalence of poverty, vice, and misery amid dense pop- 
ulations; the general effect of material progress in in- 
creasing population without relieving pauperism; the 
rapid growth of numbers in newly settled countries and 
the evident retardation of increase in more densely set- 
tled countries by the mortality among the class con- 
demned to want. 

The Malthusian theory furnishes a general principle 
which accounts for these and similar facts, and accounts 
for them in a way which harmonizes with the doctrine 
that wages are drawn from capital, and with all the prin- 
ciples that are deduced from it. According to the cur- 
rent doctrine of wages, wages fall as increase in the num- 



Chap. I. THE MALTHUSIAIST THEORY. 97 

ber of laborers necessitates a more minute division of 
capital; according to the Malthusian theory, poverty 
appears as increase in population necessitates the more 
minute division of subsistence. It requires but the 
identification of capital with subsistence, and number of 
laborers with population, an identification made in the 
current treatises on political economy, where the terms 
are often converted, to make the two propositions as 
identical formally as they are substantially.* And thus 
it is, as stated by Buckle in the passage previously 
quoted, that the theory of population advanced by Mal- 
thus has appeared to prove decisively the theory of wages 
advanced by Smith. 

Kicardo, who a few years subsequent to the publica- 
tion of the "Essay on Population" corrected the mistake 
into which Smith had fallen as to the nature and cause 
of rent, furnished the Malthusian theory an additional 
support by calling attention to the fact that rent would 
increase as the necessities of increasing population forced 
cultivation to less and less productive lands, or to less 
and less productive points on the same lands, thus ex- 
plaining the rise of rent. In this way was formed a 
triple combination, by which the Malthusian theory has 
been buttressed on both sides — the previously received 
doctrine of wages and the subsequently received doctrine 
of rent exhibiting in this view but special examples of 
the operation of the general principle to which the name 
of Malthus has been attached — the fall in wages and the 
rise in rents which come with increasing population 
being but modes in which the pressure of population 
upon subsistence shows itself. 

Thus taking its place in the very framework of polit- 

* The effect of the Malthusian doctrine upon the definitions of 
capital may, I think, be seen by comparing (see pp. 32, 33, 34) the defi- 
nition of Smith, who wrote prior to Malthus, with the definitions of 
Bicardo, McCulloch and Mill,, who wrote subsequently 



98 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book U 

ical economy (for the science as currently accepted has 
undergone no material change or improvement since the 
time of Kicardo, though in some minor points it has been 
cleared and illustrated), the Malthusian theory, though 
repugnant to sentiments before alluded to, is not repug- 
nant to other ideas, which, in older countries at least, 
generally prevail among the working classes; but, on 
the contrary, like the theory of wages by which it i; 
supported and in turn supports, it harmonizes wil ~ 
them. To the mechanic or operative the cause of low 
wages and of the inability to get employment is obviously 
the competition caused by the pressure of numbers, and 
in the squalid abodes of poverty what seems clearer than 
that there are too many people? 

But the great cause of the triumph of this theory is, 
that, instead of menacing any vested right or antagoniz- 
ing any powerful interest, it is eminently soothing and 
reassuring to the classes who, wielding the power of 
wealth, largely dominate thought. At a time when old 
supports were falling away, it came to the rescue of the 
special privileges by which a few monopolize so much 
of the good things of this world, proclaiming a natural 
cause for the want and misery which, if attributed to 
political institutions, must condemn every government 
under which they exist. The "Essay on Population" 
was avowedly a reply to William Godwin's "Inquiry con- 
cerning Political Justice," a work asserting the principle 
of human equality; and its purpose was to justify exist- 
ing inequality by shifting the responsibility for it from 
human institutions to the laws of the Creator. There 
was nothing new in this, for Wallace, nearly forty years 
before, had brought forward the danger of excessive 
multiplication as the answer to the demands of justice 
fo\ an equal distribution of wealth; but the circum- 
stances of the times were such as to make the same idea, 
*»hp.T> brought forward by Malthus, peculiarly grateful 



Chap. 1. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 99 

to a powerful class, in whom an intense fear of any ques- 
tioning of the existing state of things had been generated 
by the outburst of the French Eevolution. 

Now, as then, the Malthusian doctrine parries the de- 
mand for reform, and shelters selfishness from question 
and from conscience by the interposition of an inevitable 
necessity. It furnishes a philosophy by which Dives as he 
feasts can shut out the image of Lazarus who faints with 
hunger at his door; by which wealth may complacently but- 
ton up its pocket when poverty asks an alms, and the rich 
Christian bend on Sundays in a nicely upholstered pew 
to implore the good gifts of the All Father without any 
feeling of responsibility for the squalid misery that is 
festering but a square away. For poverty, want, and 
starvation are by this theory not chargeable either to in- 
dividual greed or to social mal-adjustments; they are 
the inevitable results of universal laws, with which, if it 
were not impious, it were as hopeless to quarrel as with 
the law of gravitation. In this view, he who in the 
midst of want has accumulated wealth, has but fenced 
in a little oasis from the driving sand which else would 
have overwhelmed it. He has gained for himself, but 
has hurt nobody. And even if the rich were literally to 
obey the injunctions of Christ and divide their wealth 
among the poor, nothing would be gained. Population 
would be increased, only to press again upon the limits 
of subsistence or capital, and the equality that would be 
produced would be but the equality of common misery. 
And thus reforms which would interfere with the inter- 
ests of any powerful class are discouraged as hopeless. 
As the moral law forbids any forestalling of the methods 
by which the natural law gets rid of surplus population 
and thus holds in check a tendency to increase potent 
enough to pack the surface of the globe with human 
beings as sardines are packed in a box, nothing can 
really be done, either by individual or by combined 



100 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book It 

effort, to extirpate poverty, save to trust to the efficacy 
of education and preach the necessity of prudence. 

A theory that, falling in with the habits of thought of 
the poorer classes, thus justifies the greed of the rich 
and the selfishness of the powerful, will spread quickly 
and strike its roots deep. This has been the case with 
the theory advanced by Malthus. 

And of late years the Malthusian theory has received 
new support in the rapid change of ideas as to the origin 
of man and the genesis of species. That Buckle wa& 
right in saying that the promulgation of the Malthusian 
theory marked an epoch in the history of speculative 
thought could, it seems to me, be easily shown; yet te 
trace its influence in the higher domains of philosophy, 
of which Buckle's own work is an example, would > 
though extremely interesting, carry us beyond the scope 
of this investigation. But how much be reflex and how 
much original, the support which is given to the Malthu- 
sian theory by the new philosophy of development, now 
rapidly spreading in every direction, must be noted in 
any estimate of the sources from which this theory de- 
rives its present strength. As in political economy, the. 
support received from the doctrine of wages and the 
doctrine of rent combined to raise the Malthusian theory 
to the rank of a central truth, so the extension of similar 
ideas to the development of life in all its forms has the 
effect of giving it a still higher and more impregnable 
position. Agassiz, who, to the day of his death, was a 
strenuous opponent of the new philosophy, spoke of 
Darwinism as "Malthus all over," * and Darwin himself 
says the struggle for existence "is the doctrine of Mal- 
thus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and 
vegetable kingdoms."! 

* Address before Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, 187k 
Report U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1873. 

| Origin of S^e^ies, ChaD. III. 



Chap. L THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 101 

It does not, however, seem to me exactly correct to 
say that the theory of development by natural selection 
or survival of the fittest is extended Malthusianism, for 
the doctrine of Malthus did not originally and does not 
necessarily involve the idea of progression. But this was 
soon added to it. McCulloch* attributes to the "prin- 
ciple of increase" social improvement and the progress 
of the arts, and declares that the poverty that it engen- 
ders acts as a powerful stimulus to the development of 
industry, the extension of science and the accumulation 
of wealth by the upper and middle classes, without which 
stimulus society would quickly sink into apathy and de- 
cay. What is this but the recognition in regard to 
human society of the developing effects of the "struggle 
for existence" and "survival of the fittest," which we 
are now told on the authority of natural science have 
been the means which Nature has employed to bring 
forth all the infinitely diversified and wonderfully 
adapted forms which the teeming life of the globe as- 
sumes? What is it but the recognition of the force, 
which, seemingly cruel and remorseless, has yet in the 
course of unnumbered ages developed the higher from 
the lower type, differentiated the man and the monkey, 
and made the Nineteenth Century succeed the age of 
stone? 

Thus commended and seemingly proved, thus linked 
and buttressed, the Malthusian theory — the doctrine 
that poverty is due to the pressure of population against 
subsistence, or, to put it in its other form, the doctrine 
that the tendency to increase in the number of laborers 
must always tend to reduce wages to the minimum on 
which laborers can reproduce — is now generally accepted 
as an unquestionable truth, in the light of which social 
phenomena are to be explained, just as for ages the 

*Note IV. to Wealth of Nations. 



102 POPULATION AXD SUBSISTENCE. Book IL 

phenomena of the sidereal heavens were explained upon 
the supposition of the fixity of the earth, or the facts of 
geology upon that of the literal inspiration of the Mosaic 
record. If authority were alone to be considered, for- 
mally to deny this doctrine would require almost as much 
audacity as that of the colored preacher who recently 
started out on a crusade against the opinion that the 
earth moves around the sun, for in one form or another, 
the Malthusian doctrine has received in the intellectual 
world an almost universal indorsement, and in the best 
as in the most common literature of the day may be seen 
cropping out in every direction. It is indorsed by 
economists and by statesmen, by historians and by 
natural investigators; by social science congresses and 
by trade unions; by churchmen and by materialists; by 
conservatives of the strictest sect and by the most radical 
of radicals. It is held and habitually reasoned from by 
many who never heard of Malthus and who have not the 
slightest idea of what his theory is. 

Nevertheless, as the grounds of the current theory of 
wages have vanished when subjected to a candid exami- 
nation, so, do I believe, will vanish the grounds of this, 
its twin. In proving that wages are not drawn from 
•capital we have raised this Antaeus from the earth. 



CHAPTER II. 

INFEKEKCES FROM FACTS, 

The general acceptance of the Malthusian theory and 
the high authority by which it is indorsed have seemed 
to me to make it expedient to review its grounds and 
the causes which have conspired to give it such a domi- 
nating influence in the discussion of social questions. 

But when we subject the theory itself to the test of 
straightforward analysis, it will, I think, be found as 
utterly untenable as the current theory of wages. 

In the first place, the facts which are marshaled in 
support of this theory do not prove it, and the analogies 
do not countenance it. 

And in the second place, there are facts which con- 
clusively disprove it. 

I go to the heart of the matter in saying that there is 
no warrant, either in experience or analogy, for the as- 
sumption that there is any tendency in population to 
increase faster than subsistence. The facts cited to show 
this simply show that where, owing to the sparseness of 
population, as in new countries, or where, owing to the 
unequal distribution of wealth, as among the poorer 
classes in old countries, human life is occupied with the 
physical necessities of existence, the tendency to repro- 
duce is at a rate which would, were it to go on un- 
checked, some time exceed subsistence. But it is not a 
legitimate inference from this that the tendency to re- 
produce would show itself in the same force where popu- 



104 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II. 

lation was sufficiently dense and wealth distributed with 
sufficient evenness to lift a whole community above the 
necessity of devoting their energies to a struggle for mere 
existence. Nor can it be assumed that the tendency to 
reproduce, by causing poverty, must prevent the exist- 
ence of such a community; for this, manifestly, would 
be assuming the very point at issue, and reasoning in a 
circle. And even if it be admitted that the tendency to 
multiply must ultimately produce poverty, it cannot 
from this alone be predicated of existing poverty that it 
is due to this cause, until it be shown that there are no 
other causes which can account for it — a thing in the 
present state of government, laws, and customs, mani- 
festly impossible. 

This is abundantly shown in the "Essay on Popula- 
tion" itself. This famous book, which is much oftener 
spoken of than read, is still well worth perusal, if only 
as a literary curiosity. The contrast between the merits 
of the book itself and the effect it has produced, or is at 
least credited with (for though Sir James Stewart, Mr. 
Townsend, and others, share with Malthus the glory of 
discovering "the principle of population," it was the 
publication of the "Essay on Population" that brought 
it prominently forward), is, it seems to me, one of the 
most remarkable things in the history of literature; and 
it is easy to understand how Godwin, whose "Political 
Justice" provoked the "Essay on Population," should 
until his old age have disdained a reply. It begins with 
the assumption that population tends to increase in a 
geometrical ratio, while subsistence can at best be made 
to increase only in an arithmetical ratio — an assumption 
just as valid, and no more so, than it would be, from the 
fact that a puppy doubled the length of his tail while he 
added so many pounds to his weight, to assert a geomet- 
ric progression of tail and an arithmetical progression 
of weight. And, the inference from the assumption is 



Chap. 77. IKFEREXCES FROM FACTS. 105 

just such as Swift in satire might have credited to the 
sayans of a previously dogless island, who, by bringing 
these two ratios together, might deduce the very "strik- 
ing consequence" that by the time the dog grew to a 
weight of fifty pounds his tail would be over a mile long, 
and extremely difficult to wag, and hence recommend 
the prudential check of a bandage as the only alterna- 
tive to the positive check of constant amputations,, 
Commencing with such an absurdity, the essay includes 
a long argument for the imposition of a duty on the im- 
portation, and the payment of a bounty for the exporta- 
tion of corn, an idea that has long since been sent to the 
limbo of exploded fallacies. And it is marked through- 
out the argumentative portions by passages which show 
on the part of the reverend gentleman the most ridicu- 
lous incapacity for logical thought — as, for instance, 
that if wages were to be increased from eighteen pence 
or two shillings per day to five shillings, meat would 
necessarily increase in price from eight or nine pence to 
two or three shillings per pound, and the condition of 
the laboring classes would therefore not be improved, a 
statement to which I can think of no parallel so close as 
a proposition I once heard a certain printer gravely ad- 
vance — that because an author, whom he had known, 
was forty years old when he was twenty, the author must 
now be eighty years old because he (the printer) was 
forty. This confusion of thought does not merely crop 
out here and there; it characterizes the whole work.* 

* MaUnus' other works, though written after he became famous, 
made no mark, and are treated with contempt even by those who 
find in the Essay a great discovery. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
for instance, though fully accepting the Malthusian theory, says of 
Malthus' Political Economy: "It is very ill arranged, and is in no 
respect either a practical or a scientific exposition of the subject. It 
is in great part occupied with an examination of parts of Mr. 
Ricardo's peculiar doctrines, and with an inquiry into the nature and 



106 POPULATION AXD SUBSISTENCE. Book H 

The main body of the book is taken up with what is in 
reality a refutation of the theory which the book ad- 
vances, for Malthus' review of what he calls the positive 
checks to population is simply the showing that the re* 
suits which he attributes to over-population actually 
arise from other causes. Of all the cases cited, and 
pretty much the whole globe is passed over in the survey, 
in which vice and misery check increase by limiting mar- 
riages or shortening the term of human life, there is not 
a single case in which the vice and misery can be traced 
to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the 
power of the accompanying hands to feed them; but in 
every case the vice and misery are shown to spring either 
from unsocial ignorance and rapacity, or from bad gov- 
ernment, unjust laws or destructive warfare. 

Nor what Malthus failed to show has any one since 
him shown. The globe may be surveyed and history 
may be reviewed in vain for any instance of a considera- 
ble country* in which poverty and want can be fairly 
attributed to the pressure of an increasing population. 
Whatever be the possible dangers involved in the power 
of human increase, they have never yet appeared. What- 
ever may some time be, this never yet has been the evil 
that has afflicted mankind. Population always tending 

causes of value. Nothing, however, can be more unsatisfactory than 
these discussions. In truth Mr. Malthus never had any clear or 
accurate perception of Mr. Ricardo's theories, or of the principles 
which determine the value in exchange of different articles." 

* I say considerable country, because there may be small islands, 
such as Pitcairn's Island, cut off from communication with the rest 
of the world and consequently from the exchanges which are nec- 
essary to the improved modes of production resorted to as population 
becomes dense, which may seem to offer examples in point. A 
moment's reflection, however, will show that these exceptional cases 
are not in point 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 107 

to overpass the limit of subsistence! How is it, then, 
that this globe of ours, after all the thousands, and it is 
now thought millions, of years that man has been upon 
the earth, is yet so thinly populated? How is it, then, 
that so many of the hives of human life are now deserted 
« — that once cultivated fields are rank with jungle, and 
the wild beast licks her cubs where once were busy 
haunts of men? 

It is a fact, that, as we count our increasing millions, 
we are apt to lose sight of — nevertheless it is a fact — that 
in what we know of the world's history decadence of 
population is as common as increase. Whether the 
aggregate population of the earth is now greater than at 
any previous epoch is a speculation which can deal only 
with guesses. Since Montesquieu, in the early part of 
the last century, asserted, what was then probably the 
prevailing impression, that the population of the earth 
had, since the Christian era, greatly declined, opinion 
has run the other way. But the tendency of recent in- 
vestigation and exploration has been to give greater 
credit to what have been deemed the exaggerated accounts 
of ancient historians and travelers, and to reveal indica- 
tions of denser populations and more advanced civiliza- 
tions than had before been suspected, as well as of a 
higher antiquity in the human race. And in basing our 
estimates of population upon the development of trade, 
the advance of the arts, and the size of cities, we are apt 
to underrate the density of population which the inten- 
sive cultivations, characteristic of the earlier civiliza- 
tions, are capable of maintaining — especially where irri- 
gation is resorted to. As we may see from the closely 
cultivated districts of China and Europe a very great 
population of simple habits can readily exist with very 
little commerce and a much lower stage of those arts in 
which modern progress has been most marked, and w r ith- 



108 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

out that tendency to concentrate in cities which modern 
populations show.* 

Be this as it may, the only continent w T hich we can be 
sure now contains a larger population than ever before is 
Europe. But this is not true of all parts of Europe. 
Certainly Greece, the Mediterranean Islands, and Turkey 
in Europe, probably Italy, and possibly Spain, have con- 
tained larger populations than now, and this may be 
likewise true of Northwestern and parts of Central and 
Eastern Europe. 

America also has increased in population during the 
time we know of it; but this increase is not so great as is 
popularly supposed, some estimates giving to Peru alone 
at the time of the discovery a greater population than 
now exists on the whole continent of South America. 
And all the indications are that previous to the discovery 
the population of America had been declining. What 
great nations have run their course, what empires have 
arisen and fallen in "that new world which is the old," 
we can only imagine. But fragments of massive ruins yet 
attest a grander pre-Incan civilization; amid the tropical 
forests of Yucatan and Central America are the remains of 
great cities forgotten ere the Spanish conquest; Mexico, as 
Cortez found it, showed the superimposition of barbarism 
upon a higher social development, while through a great 

* As may be seen from the map in H. H. Bancroft's "Native 
Races," the State of Vera Cruz is not one of those parts of Mexico 
noticeable for its antiquities. Yet Hugo Fink, of Cordova, writing 
to the Smithsonian Institute (Reports 1870), says there is hardly a 
foot in the whole State in which by excavation either a broken 
obsidian knife or a broken piece of pottery is not found; that the 
whole country is intersected with parallel lines of stones intended to 
keep the earth from washing away in the rainy season, which show 
that even the very poorest land was put into requisition, and that it 
is impossible to resist the conclusion that the ancient population 
was at least as dense as it is at present in the most populous districts 
of Europe. 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 109 

part of what is now the United States are scattered 
mounds which prove a once relatively dense population, 
and here and there, as in the Lake Superior copper 
mines, are traces of higher arts than were known to the 
Indians with whom the whites came in contact. . 

As to Africa there can be no question. Northern Af- 
rica can contain but a fraction of the population that 
it had in ancient times; the Nile Valley once held an enor- 
mously greater population than now, while south of the 
Sahara there is nothing to show increase within historic 
times, and widespread depopulation was certainly caused 
by the slave trade. 

As for Asia, which even now contains more than half 
the human race, though it is not much more than half 
as densely populated as Europe, there are indications 
that both India and China once contained larger popula- 
tions than now, while that great breeding ground of men 
from which issued swarms that overran both countries 
and sent great waves of people rolling upon Europe, 
must have been once far more populous. But the most 
marked change is in Asia Minor, Syria, Babylonia, 
Persia, and in short that vast district which yielded to 
the conquering arms of Alexander. Where were once 
great cities and teeming populations are now squalid 
villages and barren wastes. 

It is somewhat strange that among all the theories 
that have been raised, that of a fixed quantity to human 
life on this earth has not been broached. It would at 
least better accord with historical facts than that of the 
constant tendency of population to outrun subsistence. 
It is clear that population has here ebbed and there 
flowed; its centers have changed; new nations have 
arisen and old nations declined; sparsely settled districts 
have become populous and populous districts have lost 
their population; but as far back as we can go without 
abandoning ourselves wholly to inference, there is noth- 



HO POPULATION" AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

ing to show continuous increase, or even clearly to 
show an aggregate increase from time to time. The 
advance of the pioneers of peoples has, so far as we can 
discern, never been into uninhabited lands — their march 
has always been a battle with some other people pre- 
viously in possession; behind dim empires vaguer ghosts 
of empire loom. That the population of the world must 
have had its small beginnings we confidently infer, for 
we know that there was a geologic era when human life 
could not have existed, and we cannot believe that men 
sprang up all at once, as from the dragon teeth sowed by 
Cadmus; yet through long vistas, where history, tradi- 
tion and antiquities shed a light that is lost in faint glim- 
mers, we may discern large populations. And during 
these long periods the principle of population has not 
been strong enough fully to settle the world, or even so 
far as we can clearly see materially to increase its aggre- 
gate population. Compared with its capacities to sup- 
port human life the earth as a whole is yet most sparsely 
populated. 

There is another broad, general fact which cannot fail 
to strike any one who, thinking of this subject, extends 
his view beyond modern society. Malthusianism pred- 
icates a universal law — that the natural tendency of popu- 
lation is to outrun subsistence. If there be such a law, 
it must, wherever population has attained a certain 
density, become as obvious as any of the great natural 
laws which have been everywhere recognized. How is 
it, then, that neither in classical creeds and codes, nor in 
those of the Jews, the Egyptians, the Hindoos, the 
Chinese, nor any of the peoples who have lived in close 
association and have built up creeds and codes, do we 
find any injunctions to the practice of the prudential 
restraints of Malthus; but that, on the contrary, the wis- 
dom of the centuries, the religions of the world, have 
always inculcated ideas of civic and religious duty the 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. Ill 

very reverse of those which the current political econ- 
omy enjoins, and which Annie Besant is now trying to 
popularize in England? 

And it must be remembered that there have been 
societies in which the community guaranteed to every 
member employment and subsistence. John Stuart Mill 
says (Book II, Chap. XII, Sec. 2), that to do this with- 
out state regulation of marriages and births, would be to 
produce a state of general misery and degradation. 
"These consequences," he says, "have been so often and 
so clearly pointed out by authors of reputation that 
ignorance of them on the part of educated persons is no 
longer pardonable." Yet in Sparta, in Peru, in Para- 
guay, as in the industrial communities which appear 
almost everywhere to have constituted the primitive 
agricultural organization, there seems to have been an 
utter ignorance of these dire consequences of a natural 
tendency. 

Besides the broad, general facts I have cited, there are 
facts of common knowledge which seem utterly inconsist- 
ent with such an overpowering tendency to multiplica- 
tion. If the tendency to reproduce be so strong as Mal- 
thusianism supposes, how is it that families so often be- 
come extinct — families in which want is unknown? How 
is it, then, that when every premium is offered by heredi- 
tary titles and hereditary possessions, not alone to the 
principle of increase, but to the preservation of genea- 
logical knowledge and the proving up of descent, that 
in such an aristocracy as that of England, so many peer- 
ages should lapse, and the House of Lords be kept up 
from century to century only by fresh creations? 

For the solitary example of a family that has survived 
any great lapse of time, even though assured of subsist- 
ence and honor, we must go to unchangeable China. 
The descendants of Confucius still exist there, and enjoy 
peculiar privileges and consideration, forming, in fact, 



112 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book U 

the only hereditary aristocracy. On the presumption 
that population tends to double every twenty-five years, 
they should, in 2,150 years after the death of Confucius, 
have amounted to 859,559,193,106,709,670,198,710,528 
souls. Instead of any such unimaginable number, the de- 
scendants of Confucius, 2,150 years after his death, in the 
reign of Kanghi, numbered 11,000 males, or say 22,000 
souls. This is quite a discrepancy, and is the more strik- 
ing when it is remembered that the esteem in which this 
family is held on account of their ancestor, "the Most 
Holy Ancient Teacher," has prevented the operation of 
the positive check, while the maxims of Confucius incul- 
cate anything but the prudential check. 

Yet, it may be said, that even this increase is a great 
one. Twenty-two thousand persons descended from a 
single pair in 2,150 years is far short of the Malthusian 
rate. Nevertheless, it is suggestive of possible over- 
crowding. 

But consider. Increase of descendants does not show 
increase of population. It could only do this when the 
breeding was in and in. Smith and his wife have a son 
and daughter, who marry respectively some one else's 
daughter and son, and each have two children. Smith 
and his wife would thus have four grandchildren; but 
there would be in the one generation no greater number 
than in the other — each child would have four grand- 
parents. And supposing this process were to go on, the 
line of descent might constantly spread out into hun- 
dreds, thousands and millions; but in each generation of 
descendants there would be no more individuals than in 
any previous generation of ancestors. The web of gener- 
ations is like lattice-work or the diagonal threads in 
cloth. Commencing at any point at the top, the eye fol- 
lows lines which at the bottom widely diverge; but be- 
ginning at any point at the bottom, the lines diverge in 
the same way to the top. How many children a man 



Chap. 11. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 113 

may have is problematical. But that he had two parents 
is certain, and that these again had two parents each 
is also certain. Follow this geometrical progression 
through a few generations and see if it does not lead to 
quite as "striking consequences" as Mr. Malthus' peo- 
pling of the solar systems. 

But from such considerations as these let us advance 
to a more definite inquiry. I assert that the cases com- 
monly cited as instances of over-population will not bear 
investigation. India, China, and Ireland furnish the 
strongest of these cases. In each of these countries, 
large numbers have perished by starvation and large 
classes are reduced to abject misery or compelled to 
emigrate. But is this really due to over-population? 

Comparing total population with total area, India and 
China are far from being the most densely populated 
countries of the world. According to the estimates of 
MM. Behm and Wagner, the population of India is but 
132 to the square mile and that of China 119, whereas 
Saxony has a population of 442 to the square mile; Bel- 
gium 441; England 422; the Netherlands 291; Italy 234 
and Japan 233.* There are thus in both countries large 
areas unused or not fully used, but even in their more 
densely populated districts there can be no doubt that 
either could maintain a much greater population in a 
much higher degree of comfort, for in both countries is 
labor applied to production in the rudest and most in- 
efficient ways, and in both countries great natural re- 
sources are wholly neglected. This arises from no innate 

*I take these figures from the Smithsonian Keport for 1873, 
leaving out decimals. MM. Behm and Wagner put the population' 
of China at 446,500,000, though there are some who contend that it 
does not exceed 150,000,000. They put the population of Hither 
India at 206,225,580, giving 132.29 to the square mile; of Ceylon at 
2,405,287 or 97.36 to the square mile; of Further India at 21,018,062, 
or 27.94 to the square mile. They estimate the population of the 
World at 1,377,000,000, an average of 26.64 to the square mile. 



114 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book 11 

deficiency in the people, for the Hindoo, as comparative 
philology has shown, is of our own blood, and China pos- 
sessed a high degree of civilization and the rudiments of 
i,he most important modern inventions when our ances- 
tors were wandering savages. It arises from the form 
which the social organization has in both countries taken, 
which has shackled productive power and robbed indus- 
try of its reward. 

In India from time immemorial, the working classes 
have been ground down by exactions and oppressions into 
a condition of helpless and hopeless degradation. For 
ages and ages the cultivator of the soil has esteemed 
himself happy if, of his produce, the extortion of the 
strong hand left him enough to support life and furnish 
seed; capital could nowhere be safely accumulated or to 
any considerable extent be used to assist production; all 
wealth that could be wrung from the people was in the 
possession of princes who were little better than robber 
chiefs quartered on the country, or in that of their 
farmers or favorites, and was wasted in useless or worse 
than useless luxury, while religion, sunken into an elab- 
orate and terrible superstition, tyrannized over the mind 
as physical force did over the bodies of men. Under 
these conditions, the only arts that could advance were 
those that ministered to the ostentation and luxury of 
the great. The elephants of the rajah blazed with gold 
of exquisite workmanship, and the umbrellas that sym- 
bolized his regal power glittered with gems; but the plow 
of the ryot was only a sharpened stick. The ladies of 
the rajah's harem wrapped themselves in muslins so fine 
as to take the name of woven wind, but the tools of the 
artisan were of the poorest and rudest description, and 
commerce could only be carried on, as it were, by stealth. 

Is it not clear that this tyranny and insecurity have 
produced the want and starvation of India; and not, as 
according to Buckle, the pressure of population upon 



Chap. 11. INFERENCES PROM FACTS. 115 

subsistence that has produced the want, and the want the 
tyranny.* Says the Kev. "William Tennant, a chaplain 
in the service of the East India Company, writing in 
1796, two years before the publication of the "Essay on 
Population:" 

"When we reflect upon the great fertility of Hindostan, it is 
amazing to consider the frequency of famine. It is evidently not 
owing to any sterility of soil or climate; the evil must be traced to 
some political cause, and it requires but little penetration to discover 
it in the avarice and extortion of the various governments. The 
great spur to industry, that of security, is taken away. Hence no 
man raises more grain than is barely sufficient for himself, and the 
first unfavorable season produces a famine. 

" The Mogul government at no period offered full security to the 
prince, still less to his vassals; and to peasants the most scanty pro- 
tection of all. It was a continued tissue of violence and insurrection, 
treachery and punishment, under which neither commerce nor the 
arts could prosper, nor agriculture assume the appearance of a sys- 
tem. Its downfall gave rise to a state still more afflictive, since 
anarchy is worse than misrule. The Mohammedan government, 
wretched as it was, the European nations have not the merit of over- 
turning. It fell beneath the weight of its own corruption, and had 
already been succeeded by the multifarious tyranny of petty chiefs, 
whose right to govern consisted in their treason to the state, and 
whose exactions on the peasants were as boundless as their avarice. 
The rents to government were, and, where natives rule, still are, 
levied twice a year by a merciless banditti, under the semblance of 
an army, who wantonly destroy or carry off whatever part of the 
produce may satisfy their caprice or satiate their avidity, after having 
hunted the ill-fated peasants from the villages to the woods. Any 
attempt of the peasants to defend their persons or property within 
the mud walls of their villages only calls for the more signal venge- 
ance on those useful, but ill-fated mortals. They are then sur- 

* History of Civilization. Yol. I., Chap. 2. In this chapter 
Buckle has collected a great deal of evidence of the oppression and 
degradation of the people of India from the most remote times, a 
condition which, blinded by the Malthusian doctrine, he has accepted 
and made the cornerstone of his theory of the development of civili- 
zation, he attributes to the ease with which food can there be pr<? 
duced 



116 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

rounded and attacked with musketry and field pieces till resistance 
ceases, when the survivors are sold, and their habitations burned and 
leveled with the ground. Hence you will frequently meet with the 
ryots gathering up the scattered remnants of what had yesterday 
been their habitation, if fear has permitted them to return; but 
oftener the ruins are seen smoking, after a second visitation of this 
kind, without the appearance of a human being to interrupt the 
awful silence of desolation. This description does not apply to the 
Mohammedan chieftains alone; it is equally applicable to the Rajahs 
in the districts governed by Hindoos." * 

To this merciless rapacity, which would have produced 
want and famine were the population but one to a 
square mile and the land a Garden of Eden, succeeded, 
in the first era of British rule in India, as merciless a 
rapacity, backed by a far more irresistible power. Says 
Macaulay, in his essay on Lord Clive: 

" Enormous fortunes were rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 
millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretched- 
ness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never 
under tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Com- 
pany thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. * * * It resembled 
the government of evil genii, rather than the government of human 
tyrants. Sometimes they submitted in patient misery. Sometimes 
they fled from the white man as their fathers had been used to fly 
from the Maharatta, and the palanquin of the English traveler was 
often carried through silent villages and towns that the report of his 
approach had made desolate." 

Upon horrors that Macaulay thus but touches, the 
vivid eloquence of Burke throws a stronger light — whole 
districts surrendered to the unrestrained cupidity of the 
worst of human kind, poverty-stricken peasants fiend- 
ishly tortured to compel them to give up their little 
hoards, and once populous tracts turned into deserts. 

But the lawless license of early English rule has been 
long restrained,, To all that vast population the strong 

* Indian Recreations. By Rev. Wm, Tennant. London, 1804 
Vol. I., Sec. XXXIX. 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 117 

hand of England has given a more than Eoman peace; 
the just principles of English law have been extended 
by an elaborate system of codes and law officers designed 
to secure to the humblest of these abject peoples the 
rights of Anglo-Saxon freemen; the whole peninsula has 
been intersected by railways, and great irrigation works 
have been constructed. Yet, with increasing frequency, 
famine has succeeded famine, raging with greater 
intensity over wider areas. 

Is not this a demonstration of the Malthusian theory? 
Does it not show that no matter how much the possibili- 
ties of subsistence are increased, population still con- 
tinues to press upon it? Does it not show, as Malthus 
contended, that, to shut up the sluices by which super- 
abundant population is carried off, is but to compel 
nature to open new ones, and that unless the sources of 
human increase are checked by prudential regulation, 
the alternative of war is famine? This has been the 
orthodox explanation. But the truth, as may be seen in 
the facts brought forth in recent discussions of Indian 
affairs in the English periodicals, is that these famines, 
which have been, and are now, sweeping away their mil- 
lions, are no more due to the pressure of population upon 
the natural limits of subsistence than was the desolation 
of the Carnatic when Hyder Ali's horsemen burst upon it 
in a whirlwind of destruction. 

The millions of India have bowed their necks beneath 
the yokes of many conquerors, but worst of all is the 
steady, grinding weight of English domination — a weight 
which is literally crushing millions out of existence, and, 
as shown by English writers, is inevitably tending to a 
most frightful and widespread catastrophe. Other con- 
querors have lived in the land, and, though bad and 
tyrannous in their rule, have understood and been un- 
derstood by the people; but India now is like a great 
estate owned by an absentee and alien landlord. A most 



118 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book It 

expensive military and civil establishment is kept up, 
managed and officered by Englishmen who regard India 
as but a place of temporary exile; and an enormous sum, 
estimated as at least £20,000,000 annually, raised from a 
population where laborers are in many places glad in 
good times to work for 1-Jd. to 4d. a day, is drained 
away to England in the shape of remittances, pensions, 
home charges of the government, etc. — a tribute for 
which there is no return,, The immense sums lavished 
on railroads have, as shown by the returns, been econom- 
ically unproductive; the great irrigation works are for 
the most part costly failures. In large parts of India 
the English, in their desire to create a class of landed 
proprietors, turned over the soil in absolute possession to 
hereditary tax-gatherers, who rack-rent the cultivators 
most mercilessly. In other parts, where the rent is still 
taken by the State in the shape of a land tax, assessments 
are so high, and taxes are collected so relentlessly, as to 
drive the ryots, who get but the most scanty living in 
good seasons, into the claws of money lenders, who are, 
if possible, even more rapacious than the zemindars. 
Upon salt, an article of prime necessity everywhere, and 
of especial necessity where food is almost exclusively 
vegetable, a tax of nearly twelve hundred per cent, is 
imposed, so that its various industrial uses are prohib- 
ited, and large bodies of the people cannot get enough to 
keep either themselves or their cattle in health. Below 
the English officials are a horde of native employees who 
oppress and extort. The effect of English law, with its 
rigid rules, and, to the native, mysterious proceedings, 
has been but to put a potent instrument of plunder into 
the hands of the native money lenders, from whom the 
peasants are compelled to borrow on the most extrava- 
gant terms to meet their taxes, and to whom they are 
easily induced to give obligations of which they know 
not the meaning. "We do not care for the people of 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 119 

India/' writes Florence Nightingale, with what seems 
like a sob. "The saddest sight to be seen in the East- 
nay, probably in the world — is the peasant of our East- 
ern Empire." And she goes on to show the causes of 
the terrible famines, in taxation which takes from the 
cultivators the very means of cultivation, and the actual 
slavery to which the ryots are reduced as "the conse- 
quences of our own laws;" producing in "the most fer- 
tile country in the world, a grinding, chronic semi-star- 
vation in many places where what is called famine does 
not exist." * "The famines which have been devastating 
India," says H. M. Hyndman,f "are in the main finan- 
cial famines. Men and women cannot get food, because 
they cannot save the money to buy it. Yet we are 
driven, so we say, to tax these people more." And he 
shows how, even from famine stricken districts, food is 
exported in payment of taxes, and how the whole of 
India is subjected to a steady and exhausting drain, 
which, combined with the enormous expenses of govern* 
ment, is making the population year by year poorer. 
The exports of India consist almost exclusively of agri- 
cultural products. For at least one-third of these, as 
Mr. Hyndman shows, no return whatever is received; 

* Miss Nightingale (The People of India, in " Nineteenth Century'* 
for August, 1878) gives instances, which she says represent millions 
of cases, of the state of peonage to which the cultivators of Southern 
India have been reduced through the facilities afforded by the Civil 
Courts to the frauds and oppressions of money lenders and minor 
native officials. "Our Civil Courts are regarded as institutions for 
enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor, and many are fain 
to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction within native territory/' says 
Sir David Wedderburn, in an article on Protected Princes in India, 
in a previous (July) number of the same magazine, in which he also 
gives a native State, where taxation is comparatively light, as an 
instance of the most prosperous population of India. 

f See articles in "Nineteenth Century "for October, 1878, and 
March, 1879. 



120 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

they represent tribute — remittances made by English- 
men in India, or expenses of the English branch of the 
Indian government.* And for the rest, the return is for 
the most part government stores, or articles of comfort 
and luxury used by the English masters of India. He 
shows that the expenses of government have been enor- 
mously increased under Imperial rule; that the relentless 
taxation of a population so miserably poor that the 
masses are not more than half fed, is robbing them of 
their scanty means for cultivating the soil; that the 
number of bullocks (the Indian draft animal) is decreas- 
ing, and the scanty implements of culture being given up 
to money lenders, from whom "we, a business people, are 
forcing the cultivators to borrow at 12,24, 60 per cent, f 
to build and pay the interest on the cost of vast public 
works, which have never paid nearly five per cent." 
Says Mr. Hyndman: "The truth is that Indian society 
as a whole has been frightfully impoverished under our 
rule, and that the process is now going on at an exceed- 
ingly rapid rate" — a statement which cannot be doubted, 
in view of the facts presented not only by such writers 
as I have referred to, but by Indian officials themselves. 
The very efforts made by the government to alleviate 
famines do, by the increased taxation imposed, but in- 
tensify and extend their real cause. Although in the 
recent famine in Southern India six millions of people, 
it is estimated, perished of actual starvation, and the 
great mass of those who survived were actually stripped, 

* Prof. Fawcett, in a recent article on the Proposed Loans to India, 
calls attentions to such items as £1,200 for outfit and passage of a 
member of the Governor General's Council; £2,450 for outfit and 
passage of Bishops of Calcutta and Bombay. 

f Florence Nightingale says 100 per cent, is common, and even 
then the cultivator is robbed in ways which she illustrates. It is 
hardly necessary to say that these rates, like those of the pawnbroker, 
are not interest in the economic sense of the term. 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 121 

yet the taxes were not remitted and the salt tax, already 
prohibitory to the great bulk of these poverty stricken 
people, was increased forty percent., just as after the ter- 
rible Bengal famine in 1770 the revenue was actually 
driven up, by raising assessments upon the survivors and 
rigorously enforcing collection. 

In India now, as in India in past times, it is only the 
most superficial view that can attribute want and starva- 
tion to pressure of population upon the ability of the 
land to produce subsistence. Could the cultivators 
retain their little capital — could they be released from 
the drain which, even in non-famine years, reduces great 
masses of them to a scale of living not merely below 
what is deemed necessary for the sepoys, but what Eng- 
lish humanity gives to the prisoners in the jails— reviv- 
ing industry, assuming more productive forms, would 
undoubtedly suffice to keep a much greater population. 
There are still in India great areas uncultivated, vast 
mineral resources untouched, and it is certain that the 
population of India does not reach, as within historical 
times it never has reached, the real limit of the soil to 
furnish subsistence, or even the point where this power 
begins to decline with the increasing drafts made upon 
it. The real cause of want in India has been, and yet is, 
the rapacity of man, not the niggardliness of nature. 

What is true of India is true of China. Densely popu- 
lated as China is in many parts, that the extreme poverty 
of the lower classes is to be attributed to causes similar 
to those which have operated in India, and not to too 
great population, is shown by many facts. Insecurity 
prevails, production goes on under the greatest disad- 
vantages, and exchange is closely fettered. Where the 
government is a succession of squeezings, and security 
for capital of any sort must be purchased of a mandarin; 
where men's shoulders are the great reliance for inland 
transportation; where the junk is obliged to be cod- 



122 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book 1L 

structed so as to unfit it for a sea-boat; where piracy is a 
regular trade, and robbers often march in regiments, 
poverty would prevail and the failure of a crop result in 
famine, no matter how sparse the population.* That 
China is capable of supporting a much greater population 
is shown not only by the great extent of uncultivated land 
to which all travelers testify, but by the immense un~ 
worked mineral deposits which are there known to exist. 
China, for instance, is said to contain the largest and 
finest deposit of coal yet anywhere discovered. How 
much the working of these coal beds would add to the 
ability to support a greater population, may readily be 
imagined. Coal is not food, it is true; but its production 
is equivalent to the production of food. For, not only 
may coal be exchanged for food, as is done in all mining 
districts, but the force evolved by its consumption may 
be used in the production of food, or may set labor free 
for the production of food. 

Neither in India nor China, therefore, can poverty and 
starvation be charged to the pressure of population 
against subsistence. It is not dense population, but the 
causes which prevent social organization from taking its 
natural development and labor from securing its full 
return, that keep millions just on the verge of starva- 
tion, and every now and again force millions beyond it. 
That the Hindoo laborer thinks himself fortunate to get 
a handful of rice, that the Chinese eat rats and puppies, 
is no more due to the pressure of population than it is 
due to the pressure of population that the Digger Indians 
live on grasshoppers, or the aboriginal inhabitants of 
Australia eat the worms found in rotten wood. 

Let me be understood. I do not mean merely to say 
that India or China could, with a more highly developed 

* The seat of recent famine in China was not the most thickly 
settled districts. 



Vhap.II. INFERENCES FKOM FACTS. 123 

civilization, maintain a greater population, for to this 
any Malthusian would agree. The Malthusian doctrine 
does not deny that an advance in the productive arts 
would permit a greater population to find subsistence. 
But the Malthusian theory affirms — and this is its essence 
— that, whatever be the capacity for production, the 
natural tendency of population is to come up with it, 
and, in the endeavor to press beyond it, to produce, to 
use the phrase of Malthus, that degree of vice and misery 
which is necessary to prevent further increase; so that as 
productive power is increased, population will corre- 
spondingly increase, and in a little time produce the 
same results as before. What I say is this: that nowhere 
is there any instance which will support this theory; 
that nowhere can want be properly attributed to the 
pressure of population against the power to procure sub- 
sistence in the then existing degree of human knowledge; 
that everywhere the vice and misery attributed to over- 
population can be traced to the warfare, tyranny, and 
oppression which prevent knowledge from being utilized 
and deny the security essential to production. The rea- 
son why the natural increase of population does not pro- 
duce want, we shall come to hereafter. The fact that it 
has not yet anywhere done so, is what we are now con- 
cerned with. This fact is obvious with regard to India 
and China. It will be obvious, too, wherever we trace 
to their causes the results which on superficial view are 
often taken to proceed from over-population. 

Ireland, of all European countries, furnishes the great 
stock example of over-population. The extreme poverty 
of the peasantry and the low rate of wages there prevail- 
ing, the Irish famine, and Irish emigration, are con- 
stantly referred to as a demonstration of the Malthusian 
theory worked out under the eyes of the civilized world. 
I doubt if a more striking instance can be cited of the 
power of a preaccepted theory to blind men as to the 



124 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

true relations of facts. The truth is, and it lies on the 
surface, that Ireland has never yet had a population 
which the natural powers of the country, in the existing 
state of the productive arts, could not have maintained 
in ample comfort. At the period of her greatest popu- 
lation (1840-45) Ireland contained something over eight 
millions of people. But a very large proportion of them 
managed merely to exist — lodging in miserable cabins, 
clothed with miserable rags, and with but potatoes for 
their staple food. When the potato blight came, they 
died by thousands. But was it the inability of the soil 
to support so large a population that compelled so many 
to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to starva- 
tion on the failure of a single root crop? On the con- 
trary, it was the same remorseless rapacity that robbed 
the Indian ryot of the fruits of his toil and left him to 
starve where nature offered plenty. A merciless banditti 
of tax-gatherers did not march through the land plunder- 
ing and torturing, but the laborer was just as effectually 
stripped by as merciless a horde of landlords, among 
whom the soil had been divided as their absolute posses- 
sion, regardless of any rights of those who lived upon it. 
Consider the conditions of production under which 
this eight millions managed ,to live until the potato 
blight came. It was a condition to which the words 
used by Mr. Tennant in reference to India may as appro- 
priately be applied — "the great spur to industry, that of 
security, was taken away." Cultivation was for the 
most part carried on by tenants at will, who, even if the 
rack-rents which they were forced to pay had permitted 
them, did not dare to make improvements which would 
have been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor 
was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful 
manner, and labor was dissipated in aimless idleness 
that, with any security for its fruits, would have been 
applied unremittingly. But even under these condi- 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 125 

tions, it is a matter of fact that Ireland did more than 
support eight millions. For when her population was at 
its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even 
during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese 
were carted for exportation along roads lined with the 
starving and past trenches into which the dead were 
piled. For these exports of food, or at least for a great 
part of them, there was no return. So far as the people 
of Ireland were concerned, the food thus exported might 
as well have been burned up or thrown into the sea, or 
never produced. It went not as an exchange, but as a 
tribute — to pay the rent of absentee landlords; a levy 
wrung from producers by those who in no wise con- 
tributed to production. 

Had this food been left to those who raised it; had the 
cultivators of the soil been permitted to retain and use 
the capital their labor produced; had security stimulated 
industry and permitted the adoption of economical 
methods, there would have been enough to support in 
bounteous comfort the largest population Ireland ever 
had, and the potato blight might have come and gone 
without stinting a single human being of a full meal. 
For it was not the imprudence "of Irish peasants," as 
English economists coldly say, which induced them to 
make the potato the staple of their food. Irish emi- 
grants, when they can get other things, do not live upon 
the potato, and certainly in the United States the pru- 
dence of the Irish character, in endeavoring to lay by 
something for a rainy day, is remarkable. They lived on 
the potato, because rack-rents stripped everything else 
from them. The truth is, that the poverty and misery 
of Ireland have never been fairly attributable to over- 
population. 

IVfsCulloch, writing in 1838, says, in Note IV to 
"Wealth of Nations:" 



126 POPULATION AKD SUBSISTENCE. Booh 11 

"The wonderful density of population in Ireland is the immediate 
cause of the abject poverty and depressed condition of the great 
bulk of the people. It is not too much to say that there are at 
present more than double the persons in Ireland it is, with its exist- 
ing means of production, able either fully to employ or to maintain 
in a moderate state of comfort." 

As in 1841 the population of Ireland was given as 
8,175,124, we may set it down in 1838 as about eight 
millions. Thus, to change McCulloch's negative into an 
affirmative, Ireland would, according to the over-popu- 
lation theory, have been able to employ fully and main- 
tain in a moderate state of comfort something less than 
four million persons. Now, in the early part of the pre- 
ceding century, when Dean Swift wrote his "Modest 
Proposal, " the population of Ireland was about two mil- 
lions. As neither the means nor the arts of production 
had perceptibly advanced in Ireland during the interval, 
then — if the abject poverty and depressed condition of 
the Irish people in 1838 were attributable to over-popula- 
tion — there should, upon McCulloch's own admission, 
have been in Ireland in 1727 more than full employment, 
and much more than a moderate state of comfort, for 
the whole two millions. Yet, instead of this being the 
case, the abject poverty and depressed condition of the 
Irish people in 1727 were such, that, with burning, blis- 
tering irony, Dean Swift proposed to relieve surplus 
population by cultivating a taste for roasted babies, and 
bringing yearly to the shambles, as dainty food for the 
rich, 100,000 Irish infants! 

It is difficult for one who has been looking over the 
literature of Irish misery, as while writing this chapter I 
have been doin v ^, to speak in decorous terms of the com- 
placent attribution of Irish want and suffering to over- 
population which are to be found even in the works of 
such high-minded men as Mill and Buckle. I know of 
nothing better calculated to make the blood boil than 



Chap. II. INFERENCES FROM FACTS. 127 

the cold accounts of the grasping, grinding tyranny to 
which the Irish people have been subjected, and to 
which, and not to any inability of the land to support its 
population, Irish pauperism and Irish famine are to be 
attributed; and were it not for the enervating effect 
which the history of the world proves to be everywhere 
the result of abject poverty, it would be difficult to resist 
something like a feeling of contempt for a race who, 
stung by such wrongs, have only occasionally murdered 
a landlord! 

Whether over-population ever did cause pauperism and 
starvation, may be an open question; but the pauperism 
and starvation of Ireland can no more be attributed to 
this cause than can the slave trade be attributed to the 
over-population of Africa, or the destruction of Jerusa- 
lem to the inability of subsistence to keep pace with 
reproduction. Had Ireland been by nature a grove of 
bananas and bread-fruit, had her coasts been lined by the 
guano-deposits of the Chinchas, and the sun of lower 
latitudes warmed into more abundant life her moist soil, 
the social conditions that have prevailed there would 
still have brought forth poverty and starvation. How 
could there fail to be pauperism and famine in a country 
where rack-rents wrested from the cultivator of the soil 
all the produce of his labor except just enough to main- 
tain life in good seasons; where tenure at will forbade 
improvements and removed incentive to any but the most 
wasteful and poverty-stricken culture; where the tenant 
dared not accumulate capital, even if he could get it, for 
fear the landlord would demand it in the rent; where in 
fact he was an abject slave, who, at the nod of a human 
being like himself, might at any time be driven from his 
miserable mud cabin, a houseless, homeless, starving 
wanderer, forbidden even to pluck the spontaneous fruits 
of the earth, or to trap a wild hare to satisfy his hunger? 
No matter how sparse the population, no matter what 



125 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book 11 

the natural resources, are not pauperism and starvation 
necessary consequences in a land where the producers of 
wealth are compelled to work under conditions which 
deprive them of hope, of self-respect, of energy, of thrift; 
where absentee landlords drain away without return at 
least a fourth of the net produce of the soil, and when, 
besides them, a starving industry must support resident 
landlords, with their horses and hounds, agents, jobbers, 
middlemen and bailiffs, an alien state church to insult 
religious prejudices, and an army of policemen and sol- 
diers to overawe and hunt down any opposition to the 
iniquitous system? Is it not impiety far worse than 
atheism to charge upon natural laws misery so caused? 

What is true in these three cases will be found upon 
examination true of all cases. So far as our knowl- 
edge of facts goes, we may safely deny that the in- 
crease of population has ever yet pressed upon subsist- 
ence in such a way as to produce vice and misery; that 
increase of numbers has ever yet decreased the relative 
production of food. The famines of India, China, and 
Ireland can no more be credited to over-population than 
the famines of sparsely populated Brazil. The vice and 
misery that come of want can no more be attributed 
to the niggardliness of Nature than can the six mil- 
lions slain by the sword of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane's 
pyramid of skulls, or the extermination of the ancient 
Britons or of the aboriginal inhabitants of the West 
Indies. 



CHAPTER III. 

INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 

If we turn from an examination of the facts brought 
forward in illustration of the Malthusian theory to con- 
sider the analogies by which it is supported, we shall find 
the same inconclusiveness. 

The strength of the reproductive force in the animal 
and vegetable kingdoms — such facts as that a single pair 
of salmon might, if preserved from their natural enemies 
for a few years, fill the ocean; that a pair of rabbits 
would, under the same circumstances, soon overrun a 
continent; that many plants scatter their seeds by the 
hundred fold, and some insects deposit thousands of 
eggs; and that everywhere through, these kingdoms each 
species constantly tends to press, and when not limited 
by the number of its enemies, evidently does press, 
against the limits of subsistence — is constantly cited, 
from Malthus down to the text-books of the present day, 
as showing that population likewise tends to press against 
subsistence, and, when unrestrained by other means, its 
natural increase must necessarily result in such low 
wages and want, or, if that will not suffice, and the in- 
crease still goes on, in such actual starvation, as will 
keep it within the limits of subsistence. 

But is this analogy valid? It is from the vegetable 
and animal kingdoms that man's food is drawn, and 
hence the greater strength of the reproductive force in 
the vegetable and animal kingdoms than in man simply 
proves the power of subsistence to increase faster than 



130 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book IL 

population. Does not the fact that all of the things 
which furnish man's subsistence have the power to multi- 
ply many fold — some of them many thousand fold, and 
some of them many million or even billion fold — while 
he is only doubling his numbers, show that, let human 
beings increase to the full extent of their reproductive 
power, the increase of population can never exceed sub* 
sistence? This is clear when it is remembered that 
though in the vegetable and animal kingdoms each 
species, by virtue of its reproductive power, naturally 
and necessarily presses against the conditions which limit 
its further increase, yet these conditions are nowhere 
fixed and final. No species reaches the ultimate limit of 
soil, water, air, and sunshine; but the actual limit of 
each is in the existence of other species, its rivals, its 
enemies, or its food. Thus the conditions which limit 
the existence of such of these species as afford him sub- 
sistence man can extend (in some cases his mere appear- 
ance will extend them), and thus the reproductive forces 
of the species which supply his wants, instead of wasting 
themselves against their former limit, start forward in 
his service at a pace which his powers of increase can- 
not rival. If he but shoot hawks, food-birds will in- 
crease, if he but trap foxes the wild rabbits will multiply; 
the honey bee moves with the pioneer, and on the or- 
ganic matter with which man's presence fills the rivers, 
fishes feed. 

Even if any consideration of final causes be excluded; 
even if it be not permitted to suggest that the high and 
constant reproductive force in vegetables and animals 
has been ordered to enable them to subserve the uses of 
man, and that therefore the pressure of the lower forms 
of life against subsistence does not tend to show that it 
must likewise be so with man, "the roof and crown of 
things;" yet there still remains a distinction between 
man and all other forms of life that destroys the analogy. 



Chap. III. INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 131 

Of all living things, man is the only one who can give 
play to the reproductive forces, more powerful than his 
own, which supply him with food. Beast, insect, bird, 
and fish take only what they find. Their increase is at 
the expense of their food, and when they have reached 
the existing limits of food, their food must increase be- 
fore they can increase. But unlike that of any other 
living thing, the increase of man involves the increase of 
his food. If bears instead of men had been shipped 
from Europe to the North American continent, there 
would now be no more bears than in the time of Colum- 
bus, and possibly fewer, for bear food would not have 
been increased nor the conditions of bear life extended, 
by the bear immigration, but probably the reverse. But 
within the limits of the United States alone, there are 
now forty-five millions of men where then there were 
only a few hundred thousand, and yet there is now within 
that territory much more food per capita for the forty- 
five millions than there was then for the few hundred 
thousand. It is not the increase of food that has caused 
this increase of men; but the increase of men that has 
brought about the increase of food. There is more food, 
simply because there are more men. 

Here is a difference between the animal and the man. 
Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the 
more jay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men 
the more chickens. Both the seal and the man eat 
salmon, but when a seal takes a salmon there is a salmon 
the less, and were seals to increase past a certain point 
salmon must diminish; while by placing the spawn of the 
salmon under favorable conditions man can so increase 
the number of salmon as more than to make up for all he 
may take, and thus, no matter how much men may in- 
crease, their increase need never outrun the supply of 
salmon. 

In short, while all through the vegetable and animal 



132 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book 11 

kingdoms the limit of subsistence is independent of the 
thing subsisted, with man the limit of subsistence is, 
within the final limits of earth, air, water, and sunshine, 
dependent upon man himself. And this being the case, 
the analogy which it is sought to draw between the lower 
forms of life and man manifestly fails. While vegetables 
and animals do press against the limits of subsistence, 
man cannot press against the limits of his subsistence 
until the limits of the globe are reached. Observe, this 
is not merely true of the whole, but of all the parts. As 
we cannot reduce the level of the smallest bay or harbor 
without reducing the level not merely of the ocean with 
which it communicates, but of all the seas and oceans of 
the world, so the limit of subsistence in any particular 
place is not the physical limit of that place, but the 
physical limit of the globe. Fifty square miles of soil 
will in the present state of the productive arts yield sub- 
sistence for only some thousands of people, but on the 
fifty square miles which comprise the city of London 
some three and a half millions of people are maintained, 
and subsistence increases as population increases. So far 
as the limit of subsistence is concerned, London may grow 
to a population of a hundred millions, or five hundred 
millions, or a thousand millions, for she draws for sub- 
sistence upon the whole globe, and the limit which sub- 
sistence sets to her growth in population is the limit of 
the globe to furnish food for its inhabitants. 

But here will arise another idea from which the Mal- 
thusian theory derives great support — that of the dimin- 
ishing productiveness of land. As conclusively proving 
the law of diminishing productiveness it is said in the 
current treatises that were it not true that beyond a cer- 
tain point land yields less and less to additional applica- 
tions of labor and capital, increasing population would 
not cause any extension of cultivation, but that all the 
increased supnlies needed could and would be raised 



Chap.m. INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 133 

without taking into cultivation any fresh ground. As- 
sent to this seems to involve assent to the doctrine that 
the difficulty of obtaining subsistence must increase with 
increasing population. 

But I think the necessity is only in seeming. If the 
proposition be analyzed it will be seen to belong to a 
class that depend for validity upon an implied or sug- 
gested qualification — a truth relatively, which taken ab- 
solutely becomes a non-truth. For that man cannot 
exhaust or lessen the powers of nature follows from the 
indestructibility of matter and the persistence of force. 
Production and consumption are only relative terms. 
Speaking absolutely, man neither produces nor con- 
sumes. The whole human race, were they to labor to 
infinity, could not make this rolling sphere one atom 
heavier or one atom lighter, could not add to or diminish 
by one iota the sum of the forces whose everlasting cir- 
cling produces all motion and sustains all life. As the 
water that we take from the ocean must again return to 
the ocean, so the food we take from the reservoirs of 
nature is, from the moment we take it, on its way back 
to those reservoirs. What we draw from a limited ex- 
tent of land may temporarily reduce the productiveness 
of that land, because the return may be to other land, or 
may be divided between that land and other land, or, 
perhaps, all land; but this possibility lessens with in- 
creasing area, and ceases when the whole globe is con- 
sidered. That the earth could maintain a thousand bil- 
lions of people as easily as a thousand millions is a neces- 
sary deduction from the manifest truths that, at least so 
far as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal and 
force must forever continue to act. Life does not use 
up the forces that maintain life. We come into the 
material universe bringing nothing; we take nothing 
away when we depart. The human being, physically 
considered, is but a transient form of matter, a changing 



i 



134 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book 11 

mode of motion. The matter remains and the force 
persists. Nothing is lessened, nothing is weakened. 
And from this it follows that the limit to the population 
of the globe can be only the limit of space. 

Now this limitation of space — this danger that the 
human race may increase beyond the possibility of finding 
elbow room — is so far off as to have for us no more prac- 
tical interest than the recurrence of the glacial period or 
the final extinguishment of the sun. Yet remote and 
shadowy as it is, it is this possibility which gives to the 
Malthusian theory its apparently self-evident character. 
But if we follow it, even this shadow will disappear. 
It, also, springs from a false analogy. That vegetable 
and animal life tend to press against the limits of space 
does not prove the same tendency in human life. 

Granted that man is only a more highly developed 
animal; that the ring-tailed monkey is a distant relative 
who has gradually developed acrobatic tendencies, and 
the hump-backed whale a far-off connection who in early 
life took to the sea — granted that back of these he is kin 
to the vegetable, and is still subject to the same laws as 
plants, fishes, birds, and beasts. Yet there is still this 
difference between man and all other animals — he is the 
only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the 
only animal that is never satisfied. The wants of every 
other living thing are uniform and fixed. The ox of to- 
day aspires to no more than did the ox when man first 
yoked him. The sea gull of the English Channel, who 
poises himself above the swift steamer, wants no better 
food or lodging than the gulls who circled round as the 
keels of Caesar's galleys first grated on a British beach. 
Of all that nature offers them, be it ever so abundant, all 
living things save man can take, and care for, only 
enough to supply wants which are definite and fixed. 
The only use they can make of additional supplies 01 
additional opportunities is to multiply. 



dhap.ni. INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 135 

But not so with man. No sooner are his animal wants 
satisfied than new wants arise. Food he wants first, as 
does the beast; shelter next, as does the beast; and these 
given, his reproductive instincts assert their sway, as do 
those of the beast. But here man and beast part com- 
pany. The beast never goes further; the man has but 
set his feet on the first step of an infinite progression — a 
progression upon which the beast never enters; a pro- 
gression away from and above the beast. 

The demand for quantity once satisfied, he seeks 
quality. The very desires that he has in common with 
the beast become extended, refined, exalted. It is not 
merely hunger, but taste, that seeks gratification in food; 
in clothes, he seeks not merely comfort, but adornment; 
the rude shelter becomes a house; the undiscriminating 
sexual attraction begins to transmute itself into subtile in- 
fluences, and the hard and common stock of animal life 
to blossom and to bloom into shapes of delicate beauty. 
As power to gratify his wants increases, so does aspira- 
tion grow. Held down to lower levels of desire, Lucullus 
will sup with Lucullus; twelve boars turn on spits that 
Antony's mouthful of meat maybe done to a turn; every 
kingdom of Nature be ransacked to add to Cleopatra's 
charms, and marble colonnades and hanging gardens and 
pyramids that rival the hills arise. Passing into higher 
forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant and fit- 
fully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man. The eyes 
of the mind are opened, and he longs to know. He 
braves the scorching heat of the desert and the icy blasts 
of the polar sea, but not for food; he watches all night, 
but it is to trace the circling of the eternal stars. He 
adds toil to toil, to gratify a hunger no animal has felt; 
to assuage a thirst no beast can know. 

Out upon nature, in upon himself, back through the 
mists that shroud the past, forward into the darkness 
that overhangs the future, turns the restless desire that 



136 POPULATION AND SUBSISTBKCE. Book 21 

arises when the animal wants slumber in satisfaction. 
Beneath things, he seeks the law; he would know how 
the globe was forged and the stars were hung, and trace 
to their origins the springs of life. And, then, as the 
man develops his nobler nature, there arises the desire 
higher yet — the passion of passions, the hope of hopes — 
the desire that he, even he, may somehow aid in making 
life better and brighter, in destroying want and sin, sor- 
row and shame. He masters and curbs the animal; he 
turns his back upon the feast and renounces the place of 
power; he leaves it to others to accumulate wealth, to 
gratify pleasant tastes, to bask themselves in the warm 
sunshine of the brief day. He works for those he never 
saw and never can see; for a fame, or maybe but for a 
scant justice, that can only come long after the clods 
have rattled upon his coffin lid. He toils in the advance, 
where it is cold, and there is little cheer from men, and 
the stones are sharp and the brambles thick. Amid the 
scoffs of the present and the sneers that stab like knives, 
he builds for the future; he cuts the trail that progress- 
ive humanity may hereafter broaden into a highroad. 
Into higher, grander spheres desire mounts and beckons, 
and a star that rises in the east leads him on. Lo! the 
pulses of the man throb with the yearnings of the god— - 
he would aid in the process of the suns! 

Is not the gulf too wide for the analogy to span? Give 
more food, open fuller conditions of life, and the vege- 
table or animal can but multiply; the man will develop. 
In the one the expansive force can but extend existence 
in new numbers; in the other, it will inevitably tend to 
extend existence in higher forms and wider powers. 
Man is an animal; but he is an animal plus something 
else. He is the mythic earth-tree, whose roots are in the 
ground, but whose topmost branches may blossom in the 
heavens! 

Whichever way it be turned^ the reasoning by which 



Chap. III. INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 137 

this theory of the constant tendency of population to 
press against the limits of subsistence is supported shows 
an unwarranted assumption, an undistributed middle, as 
the logicians would say. Facts do not warrant it, anal- 
ogy does not countenance it. It is a pure chimera of 
the imagination, such as those that for a long time pre- 
vented men from recognizing the rotundity and motion 
of the earth. It is just such a theory as that under- 
neath us everything not fastened to the earth must fall 
off; as that a ball dropped from the mast of a ship in 
motion must fall behind the mast; as that a live fish 
placed in a vessel full of water will displace no water. 
It is as unfounded, if not as grotesque, as an assumption 
we can imagine Adam might have made had he been of 
an arithmetical turn of mind and figured on the growth 
of his first baby from the rate of its early months. From 
the fact that at birth it weighed ten pounds and in eight 
months thereafter twenty pounds, he might, with the 
arithmetical knowledge which some sages have supposed 
him to possess, have ciphered out a result quite as strik- 
ing as that of Mr. Malthus; namely, that by the time it 
got to be ten years old it would be as heavy as an ox, at 
twelve as heavy as an elephant, and at thirty would 
weigh no less than 175,716,339,548 tons. 

The fact is, there is no more reason for us to trouble 
ourselves about the pressure of population upon subsist- 
ence than there was for Adam to worry himself about the 
rapid growth of his baby. So far as an inference is 
really warranted by facts and suggested by analogy, it is 
that the law of population includes such beautiful adap- 
tations as investigation has already shown in other 
natural laws, and that we are no more warranted in as- 
suming that the instinct of reproduction, in the natural 
development of society, tends to produce misery and vice, 
than we should be in assuming that the force of gravita- 
tion must hurl the moon to the earth and the earth to the 



138 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II. 

sun, or than in assuming from the contraction of water 
with reductions of temperature down to thirty-two 
degrees that rivers and lakes must freeze to the bottom 
with every frost, and the temperate regions of earth be 
thus rendered uninhabitable by even moderate winters. 
That, besides the positive and prudential checks of Mai- 
thus, there is a third check which comes into play with 
the elevation of the standard of comfort and the develop- 
ment of the intellect, is pointed to by many well-known 
facts. The proportion of births is notoriously greater in 
new settlements, where the struggle with nature leaves 
little opportunity for intellectual life, and among the 
poverty-bound classes of older countries, who in the 
midst of wealth are deprived of all its advantages and re- 
duced to all but an animal existence, than it is among 
the classes to whom the increase of wealth has brought 
independence, leisure, comfort, and a fuller and more 
varied life. This fact, long ago recognized in the 
homely adage, "a rich man for luck, and a poor man for 
children/' was noted by Adam Smith, who says it is not 
uncommon to find a poor half-starved Highland woman 
has been the mother of twenty-three or twenty-four chil- 
dren, and is everywhere so clearly perceptible that it is 
only necessary to allude to it. 

If the real law of population is thus indicated, as I 
think it must be, then the tendency to increase, instead 
of being always uniform, is strong where a greater popu- 
lation would give increased comfort, and where the per- 
petuity of the race is threatened by the mortality in- 
duced by adverse conditions; but weakens just as the 
higher development of the individual becomes possible 
and the perpetuity of the race is assured. In other 
words, the law of population accords with and is subordi- 
nate to the law of intellectual development, and any 
danger that human beings may be brought into a world 
where they cannot be provided for arises not from the 



Chap. in. INFERENCES FROM ANALOGY. 139 

ordinances of nature, but from social mal-adjustments 
that in the midst of wealth condemn men to want. The 
truth of this will, I think, be conclusively demonstrated 
when, after having cleared the ground, we trace out the 
true laws of social growth. But it would disturb the 
natural order of the argument to anticipate them now. 
If I have succeeded in maintaining a negative — in show- 
ing that the Malthusian theory is not proved by the rea- 
soning by which it is supported — it is enough for the 
present. In the next chapter I propose to take thf 
affirmative and show that it is disproved by facts. 



CHAPTER IV. 

DISPROOF OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 

So deeply rooted and thoroughly entwined with the 
reasonings of the current political economy is this doc- 
trine that increase of population tends to reduce wages 
and produce poverty, so completely does it harmonize 
with many popular notions, and so liable is it to recur in 
different shapes, that I have thought it necessary to meet 
and show in some detail the insufficiency of the argu- 
ments by which it is supported, before bringing it to the 
test of facts; for the general acceptance of this theory 
adds a most striking instance to the many which the his- 
tory of thought affords of how easily men ignore facte 
when blindfolded by a preaccepted theory. 

To the supreme and final test of facts we can easily 
bring this theory. Manifestly the question whether in- 
crease of population necessarily tends to reduce wages 
and cause want, is simply the question whether it tends 
to reduce the amount of wealth that can be produced by 
a given amount of labor. 

This is what the current doctrine holds. The accepted 
theory is, that the more that is required from nature the 
less generously does she respond, so that doubling the 
application of labor will not double the product; and 
hence, increase of population must tend to reduce wages 
and deepen poverty, or, in the phrase of Malthus, must 
result in vice and misery. To quote the language of 
John Stuart Mill: 

" A greater number of people cannot, in any given state of civili* 



Chap. IV. DISPK00F OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 141 

zation, be collectively so well provided for as a smaller. The 
niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is the cause of 
the penalty attached to over-population. An unjust distribution of 
wealth does not aggravate the evil, but, at most, causes it be some- 
what earlier felt. It is in vain to say that all mouths which the in- 
crease of mankind calls into existence bring with them hands. The 
new mouths require as much food as the old ones, and the hands do 
not produce as much. If all instruments of production were held in 
joint property by the whole people, and the produce divided with 
perfect equality among them, and if in a society thus constituted, 
industry were as energetic and the produce as ample as at the present 
time, there would be enough to make all the existing population ex- 
tremely comfortable; but when that population had doubled itself, 
as, with existing habits of the people, under such an encouragement, 
it undoubtedly would in little more than twenty years, what would 
then be their condition? Unless the arts of production were in the 
same time improved in an almost unexampled degree, the inferior 
soils which must be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily 
remunerative cultivation which must be employed on the superior 
soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, would, by an 
insuperable necessity, render every individual in the community 
poorer than before. If the population continued to increase at the 
same rate, a time would soon arrive when no one would have more 
than mere necessaries, and, soon after, a time when no one would 
have a sufficiency of those, and the further increase of population 
would be arrested by death." * 

All this I deny. I assert that the very reverse of these 
propositions is true. I assert that in any given state of 
civilization a greater number of people can collectively 
be better provided for than a smaller. I assert that the 
•injustice of society, not the niggardliness of nature, is 
the cause of the want and misery which the current 
theory attributes to over-population. I assert that the 
new mouths which an increasing population calls into 
existence require no more food than the old ones, while 
the hands they bring with them can in the natural order 
of things produce more. I assert that, other things being 
equal, the greater the population, the greater the com- 

i- , i, ■ n 

* Principles of Political Economy, Book I., Chap. XIII., Sec. 2. 



142 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

fort which an equitable distribution of wealth would 
give to each individual. I assert that in a state of 
equality the natural increase of population would con- 
stantly tend to make every individual richer instead of 
poorer. 

I thus distinctly join issue, and submit the question to 
the test of facts. 

But observe (for even at the risk of repetition I wish 
to warn the reader against a confusion of thought that 
is observable even in writers of great reputation), that 
the question of fact into which this issue resolves itself is 
not in what stage of population is most subsistence pro- 
duced? but in what stage of population is there exhibited 
the greatest power of producing wealth? For the power 
of producing wealth in any form is the power of produc- 
ing subsistence — and the consumption of wealth in any 
form, or of wealth-producing power, is equivalent to the 
consumption of subsistence. I have, for instance, some 
money in my pocket. With it I may buy either food or 
cigars or jewelry or theater tickets, and just as I expend 
my money do I determine labor to the production of 
food, of cigars, of jewelry, or of theatrical representa- 
tions. A set of diamonds has a value equal to so many 
barrels of flour — that is to say, it takes on the average as 
much labor to produce the diamonds as it would to pro- 
duce so much flour. If I load my wife with diamonds, it 
is as much an exertion of subsistence-producing power 
as though I had devoted so much food to purposes of 
ostentation. If I keep a footman, I take a possible plow- 
man from the plow. The breeding and maintenance of 
a race-horse require care and labor which would suffice 
for the breeding and maintenance of many work-horses. 
The destruction of wealth involved in a general illumina- 
tion or the firing of a salute is equivalent to the burning 
up of so much food; the keeping of a regiment of sol- 
diers, or of a war-ship and her crew, is the diversion to 



Chap. IV. DISPROOF OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 143 

unproductive uses of labor that could produce subsist- 
ence for many thousands of people. Thus the power of 
any population to produce the necessaries of life is not 
to be measured by the necessaries of life actually pro- 
duced, but by the expenditure of power in all modes. 

There is no necessity for abstract reasoning. The 
question is one of simple fact. Does the relative power 
of producing wealth decrease with the increase of popu- 
lation? 

The facts are so patent that it is only necessary to call 
attention to them. We have, in modern times, seen 
many communities advance in population. Have they 
not at the same time advanced even more rapidly in 
wealth? We see many communities still increasing in 
population. Are they not also increasing their wealth 
still faster? Is there any doubt that while England has 
been increasing her population at the rate of two per 
cent, per annum, her wealth has been growing in still 
greater proportion? Is it not true that while the popu- 
lation of the United States has been doubling every 
twenty-nine* years her wealth has been doubling at 
much shorter intervals? Is it not true that under sim- 
ilar conditions — that is to say, among communities of 
similar people in a similar stage of civilization — the most 
densely populated community is also the richest? Are 
not the more densely populated Eastern States richer in 
proportion to population than the more sparsely popu- 
lated Western or Southern States? Is not England, 
where population is even denser than in the Eastern 
States of the Union, also richer in proportion? Where 
will you find wealth devoted with the most lavishness to 
non-productive use — costly buildings, fine furniture, lux- 
urious equipages, statues, pictures, pleasure gardens and 
yachts? Is it not where population is densest rather 

* The rate up to 1860 was 35 per cent each decadQ 



144 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book It 

than where it is sparsest? Where will you find in largest 
proportion those whom the general production suffices to 
keep without productive labor on their part — men of in- 
come and of elegant leisure, thieves, policemen, menial 
servants, lawyers, men of letters, and the like? Is it not 
where population is dense rather than where it is sparse? 
Whence is it that capital overflows for remunerative in- 
vestment? Is it not from densely populated countries to 
sparsely populated countries? These things conclusively 
show that wealth is greatest where population is densest; 
that the production of wealth to a given amount of labor 
increases as population increases. These things are ap- 
parent wherever we turn our eyes. On the same level of 
civilization, the same stage of the productive arts, gov- 
ernment, etc., the most populous countries are always 
the most wealthy. 

Let us take a particular case, and that a case which of 
all that can be cited seems at first blush best to support 
the theory we are considering — the case of a community 
where, while population has largely increased, wages 
have greatly decreased, and it is not a matter of dubious 
inference but of obvious fact that the generosity of 
nature has lessened. That community is California. 
When upon the discovery of gold the first wave of immi- 
gration poured into California it found a country in 
which nature was in the most generous mood. From 
the river banks and bars the glittering deposits of thou- 
sands of years could be taken by the most primitive appli- 
ances, in amounts which made an ounce ($16) per day 
only ordinary wages. The plains, covered with nutri- 
tious grasses, were alive with countless herds of horses 
and cattle, so plenty that any traveler was at liberty to 
shift his saddle to a fresh steed, or to kill a bullock if he 
needed a steak, leaving the hide, its only valuable part, 
for the owner. From the rich soil which came first 
under cultivation, the mere plowing and sowing brought 



Chap. IV. DISPROOF OF THE 3IALTHUSIAN THEORY. 145 

crops that in older countries, if procured at all, can only 
be procured by the most thorough manuring and culti- 
vation. In early California, amid this profusion of 
nature, wages and interest were higher than anywhere 
else in the world. 

This virgin profusion of nature has been steadily giv- 
ing way before the greater and greater demands which an 
increasing population has made upon it. Poorer and 
poorer diggings have been worked, until now no dig- 
gings worth speaking of can be found, and gold mining 
requires much capital, large skill, and elaborate machin- 
ery, and involves great risks. "Horses cost money," 
and cattle bred on the sage-brush plains of Nevada are 
brought by railroad across the mountains and killed in 
San Francisco shambles, while farmers are beginning to 
save their straw and look for manure, and land is in cul- 
tivation which will hardly yield a crop three years out 
of four without irrigation. At the same time wages and 
interest have steadily gone down. Many men are now 
glad to work for a week for less than they once demanded 
for the day, and money is loaned by the year for a rate 
which once would hardly have been thought extortionate 
by the month. Is the connection between the reduced 
productiveness of nature and the reduced rate of wages 
that of cause and effect? Is it true that wages are lower 
because labor yields less wealth? On the contrary! In- 
stead of the wealth-producing power of labor being less 
in California in 1879 than in 1849, I am convinced that 
it is greater. And, it seems to me, that no one who 
considers how enormously during these years the effici- 
ency of labor in California has been increased by roads, 
wharves, flumes, railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, and 
machinery of all kinds; by a closer connection with the 
rest of the world; and by the numberless economies re- 
sulting from a larger population, can doubt that the 
return which labor receives from nature in California is 



146 POPULATION" AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

on the whole much greater now than it was in the days of 
unexhausted placers and virgin soil — the increase in the 
power of the human factor having more than compen- 
sated for the decline in the power of the natural factor. 
'Chat this conclusion is the correct one is proved by many 
2acts which show that the consumption of wealth is now 
much greater, as compared with the number of laborers, 
than it was then. Instead of a population composed al- 
most exclusively of men in the prime of life, a large pro- 
portion of women and children are now supported, and 
other non-producers have increased in much greater ratio 
than the population; luxury has grown far more than 
wages have fallen; where the best houses were cloth and 
paper shanties, are now mansions whose magnificence 
rivals European palaces; there are liveried carriages on 
the streets of San Francisco and pleasure yachts on her 
bay; the class who can live sumptuously on their incomes 
h&s steadily grown; there are rich men beside whom the 
richest of the earlier years would seem little better than 
paupers — in short, there are on every hand the most 
striking and conclusive evidences that the production 
and consumption of wealth have increased with even 
greater rapidity than the increase of population, and that 
if any class obtains less it is solely because of the greater 
inequality of distribution. 

What is obvious in this particular instance is obvious 
where the survey is extended. The richest countries 
are not those where nature is most prolific; but those 
where labor is most efficient — not Mexico, but Massa- 
chusetts; not Brazil, but England. The countries where 
population is densest and presses hardest upon the capa- 
bilities of nature, are, other things being equal, the 
countries where the largest proportion of the produce 
can be devoted to luxury and the support of non-pro- 
ducers, the countries where capital overflows, the coun- 
tries that upon exigency, such as war, can stand the 



Chap. TV. DISPROOF OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY. 147 

greatest drain. That the production of wealth must, in 
proportion to the labor employed, be greater in a densely 
populated country like England than in new countries 
where wages and interest are higher, is evident from the 
fact that, though a much smaller proportion of the popu- 
lation is engaged in productive labor, a much larger sur- 
plus is available for other purposes than that of supplying 
physical needs. In a new country the whole available 
force of the community is devoted to production — there 
is no well man who does not do productive work of some 
kind, no well woman exempt from household tasks. 
There are no paupers or beggars, no idle rich, no class 
whose labor is devoted to ministering to the convenience 
or caprice of the rich, no purely literary or scientific 
class, no criminal class who live by preying upon society, 
no large class maintained to guard society against them. 
Yet with the whole force of the community thus devoted 
to production, no such consumption of wealth in propor- 
tion to the whole population takes place, or can be 
afforded, as goes on in the old country; for, though the 
condition of the lowest class is better, and there is no one 
who cannot get a living, there is no one who gets much 
more — few or none who can live in anything like what 
would be called luxury, or even comfort, in the older 
country. That is to say, that in the older country the 
consumption of wealth in proportion to population is 
greater, although the proportion of labor devoted to the 
production of wealth is less — or that fewer laborers pro- 
duce more wealth; for wealth must be produced before it 
can be consumed. 

It may, however, be said, that the superior wealth of 
older countries is due not to superior productive power, 
but to the accumulations of wealth which the new country 
has not yet had time to make. 

It will be well for a moment to consider this idea of 
accumulated wealth. The truth is, that wealth can be 



148 POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. Book II 

accumulated but to a slight degree, and that communities 
really live, as the vast majority of individuals live, from 
hand to mouth. Wealth will not bear much accumula- 
tion; except in a few unimportant forms it will not keep. 
The matter of the universe, which, when worked up by 
labor into desirable forms, constitutes wealth, is con- 
stantly tending back to its original state. Some forms 
of wealth will last for a few hours, some for a few days, 
some for a few months, some for a few years; and there 
are very few forms of wealth that can be passed from one 
generation to another. Take wealth in some of its most 
useful and permanent forms — ships, houses, railways, 
machinery. Unless labor is constantly exerted in pre- 
serving and renewing them, they will almost immediately 
become useless. Stop labor in any community, and 
wealth would vanish almost as the jet of a fountain 
vanishes when the flow of water is shut off. Let labor 
again exert itself, and wealth will almost as immediately 
reappear. This has been long noticed where war or 
other calamity has swept away wealth, leaving population 
unimpaired. There is not less wealth in London to-day 
because of the great fire of 1666; nor yet is there less 
wealth in Chicago because of the great fire of 1870. On 
those fire-swept acres have arisen, under the hand of 
labor, more magnificent buildings, filled with greater 
stocks of goods; and the stranger who, ignorant of the 
history of the city, passes along those stately avenues 
would not dream that a few years ago all lay so black and 
bare. The same principle — that wealth is constantly re- 
created — is obvious in every new city. Given the same 
population and the same efficiency of labor, and the town 
of yesterday will possess and enjoy as much as the town 
founded by the Komans. No one who has seen Mel- 
bourne or San Francisco can doubt that if the population 
of England were transported to New Zealand, leaving all 
accumulated wealth behind, New Zealand would soon be 



Chap. IV. DISPROOF OF THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY, 149 

as rich as England is now; or, conversely, that if the 
population of England were reduced to the sparseness of 
the present population of New Zealand, in spite of accu- 
mulated wealth, they would soon be as poor. Accumu- 
lated wealth seems to play just about such a part in rela- 
tion to the social organism as accumulated nutriment 
does to the physical organism. Some accumulated wealth 
is necessary, and to a certain extent it may be drawn 
upon in exigencies; but the wealth produced by past gen- 
erations can no more account for the consumption of 
the present than the dinners he ate last year can supply a 
man with present strength. 

But without these considerations, which I allude to 
more for their general than for their special bearing, it 
is evident that superior accumulations of wealth can ac- 
count for greater consumption of wealth only in cases where 
accumulated wealth is decreasing, and that wherever the 
volume of accumulated wealth is maintained, and even 
more obviously where it is increasing, a greater consump- 
tion of wealth must imply a greater production of 
wealth. Now, whether we compare different communi- 
ties with each other, or the same community at different 
times, it is obvious that the progressive state, which is 
marked by increase of population, is also marked by an 
increased consumption and an increased accumulation of 
wealth, not merely in the aggregate, but per capita. 
And hence, increase of population, so far as it has yet 
anywhere gone, does not mean a reduction, but an in- 
crease in the average production of wealth. 

And the reason of this is obvious. For, even if the 
increase of population does reduce the power of the 
natural factor of wealth, by compelling a resort to poorer 
soils, etc., it yet so vastly increases the power of the 
human factor as more than to compensate. Twenty 
men working together will, where nature is niggardly, 
produce more than twentv times the wealth that one ma? 



150 POPULATION" AND SUBSISTENCE. Book IL 

can produce where nature is most bountiful. The denser 
the population the more minute becomes the subdivision 
of labor, the greater the economies of production and 
distribution, and, hence, the very reverse of the Malthu- 
sian doctrine is true; and, within the limits in which we 
have reason to suppose increase would still go on, in any 
given state of civilization a greater number of people can 
produce a larger proportionate amount of wealth, and 
more fully supply their wants, than can a smaller 
number. 

Look simply at the facts. Can anything be clearer 
than that the cause of the poverty which festers in the 
centers of civilization is not in the weakness of the pro- 
ductive forces? In countries where poverty is deepest, 
the forces of production are evidently strong enough, if 
fully employed, to provide for the lowest not merely 
comfort but luxury. The industrial paralysis, the com- 
mercial depression which curses the civilized world to-day, 
evidently springs from no lack of productive power. 
Whatever be the trouble, it is clearly not in the want of 
ability to produce wealth. 

It is this very fact — that want appears where produc 
tive power is greatest and the production of wealth is 
largest — that constitutes the enigma which perplexes the 
civilized world, and which we are trying to unravel. 
Evidently the Malthusian theory, which attributes want 
to the decrease of productive power, will not explain it. 
That theory is utterly inconsistent with all the facts. It 
is really a gratuitous attribution to the laws of God of 
results which, even from this examination, we may infer 
really spring from the mal-ad jnstments of men — an infer- 
ence which, as we proceed, will become a demonstration. 
For we have yet to find what does produce poverty amid 
advancing wealth. 



BOOK III. 

THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. 



CHAPTER I. — ' 



CHAPTER II. 

CHAPTER III. 

CHAPTER IY. 

CHAPTER Y. 

CHAPTER YI. 

CHAPTER VII. 

CHAPTER VIII. 



THE INQUIRY NARROWED TO THE LAWS 
OF DISTRIBUTION — NECESSARY RELA- 
TION OF THESE LAWS. 

■RENT AND THE LAW OF RENT. 

INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 

•OF SPURIOUS CAPITAL AND OF PROFITS 
OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR INTEREST. 

THE LAW OF INTEREST. 

WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 

CORRELATION AND CO-ORDINATION OF 
THESE LAWS. 

THE STATICS OF THE PROBLEM THUS 
EXPLAINED. 



The machines that are first invented to perform any particular 
movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists 
generally discover that with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of 
motion than had originally been employed, the same effects may be 
more easily produced. The first philosophical systems, in the same 
manner, are always the most complex, and a particular connecting 
chain, or principle, is generally thought necessary to unite every two 
seemingly disjointed appearances; but it often happens that one 
great connecting principle is afterward found to be sufficient to bind 
together all the discordant phenomena that occur in a whole species 
of things. — Adam Smith, Essay on the Principles which Lead and 
Direct Philosophical Inquiries, as Illustrated by the History of 
Astronomy. 



CHAPTER L 

tHE INQUIRY NARROWED TO THE LAWS OF DISTRIBU- 
TION — THE NECESSARY RELATION OF THESE LAWS. 

The preceding examination has, I think, conclusively 
shown that the explanation currently given, in the name 
of political economy, of the problem we are attempting 
to solve, is no explanation at all. 

That with material progress wages fail to increase, but 
rather tend to decrease, cannot be explained by the theory 
that the increase of laborers constantly tends to divide 
into smaller portions the capital sum from which wages 
are paid. For, as we have seen, wages do not come from 
capital, but are the direct produce of labor. Each pro- 
ductive laborer, as he works, creates his wages, and with 
every additional laborer there is an addition to the true 
wages fund — an addition to the common stock of wealth, 
which, generally speaking, is considerably greater than 
the amount he draws in wages. 

Nor, yet, can it be explained by the theory that nature 
yields less to the increasing drafts which an increasing 
population make upon her; for the increased efficiency 
of labor makes the progressive state a state of continually 
increasing production per capita, and the countries of 
densest population, other things being equal, are always 
the countries of greatest wealth. 

So far, we have only increased the perplexities of the 
problem. We have overthrown a theory which did, in 
some sort of fashion, explain existing facts; but in doing 
so have only made existing facts seem more inexplicable. 
It is as though, while the Ptolemaic theory was yet in 



154 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book 111. 

its strength, it had been proved simply that the sun and 
stars do not revolve about the earth. The phenomena 
of day and night, and of the apparent motion of the 
celestial bodies, would yet remain unexplained, inevitably 
to reinstate the old theory unless a better one took 
its place. Our reasoning has led us to the conclusion 
that each productive laborer produces his own wages, and 
that increase in the number of laborers should increase 
the wages of each; whereas, the apparent facts are that 
there are many laborers who cannot obtain remunerative 
employment, and that increase in the number of laborers 
brings diminution of wages. We have, in short, proved 
that wages ought to be highest where in reality they are 
lowest. 

Nevertheless, even in doing this we have made some 
progress. Next to finding what we look for, is to dis- 
cover where it is useless to look. We havie at least nar- 
rowed the field of inquiry. For this, at least, is now 
clear — that the cause which, in spite of the enormous 
increase of productive power, confines the great body of 
producers to the least share of the product upon which 
they will consent to live, is not the limitation of capital, 
nor yet the limitation of the powers of nature which 
respond to labor. As it is not, therefore, to be found in 
the laws which bound the production of wealth, it must 
be sought in the laws which govern distribution. To 
*;hem let us turn. 

It will be necessary to review in its main branches the 
whole subject of the distribution of wealth. To discover 
the cause which, as population increases and the produc- 
tive arts advance, deepens the poverty of the lowest 
class, we must find the law which determines what part 
of the produce is distributed to labor as wages. To find 
the law of wages, or at least to make sure when we have 
found it, we must also determine the laws which fix the 



Chap. L THEIR NECESSARY RELATION. 155 

part of the produce which goes to capital and the part 
which goes to land owners, for as land, labor, and capital 
join in producing wealth, it is between these three that 
the produce must be divided. What is meant by the 
produce or production of a community is the sum of the 
wealth produced by that community — the general fund 
from which, as long as previously existing stock is not 
lessened, all consumption must be met and all revenues 
drawn. As I have already explained, production does 
not merely mean the making of things, but includes the 
increase of value gained by transporting or exchanging 
things. There is a produce of wealth in a purely com- 
mercial community, as there is in a purely agricultural 
or manufacturing community; and in the one case, as in 
the others, some part of this produce will go to capital, 
some part to labor, and some part, if land have any value, 
to the owners of land. As a matter of fact, a portion of 
the wealth produced is constantly going to the replace- 
ment of capital, which is constantly consumed and con- 
stantly replaced. But it is not necessary to take this into 
account, as it is eliminated by considering capital as 
continuous, which, in speaking or thinking of it, we 
habitually do. When we speak of the produce, we mean, 
therefore, that part of the wealth produced above what is 
necessary to replace the capital consumed in production; 
and when we speak of interest, or the return to capital, 
we mean what goes to capital after its replacement or 
maintenance. 

It is, further, a matter of fact, that in every commu- 
nity which has passed the most primitive stage some 
portion of the produce is taken in taxation and con- 
sumed by government. But it is not necessary, in seek- 
ing the laws of distribution, to take this into considera- 
tion. We may consider taxation either as not existing, 
or as by so much reducing the produce. And so, too, of 
what is takpn from the produce by certain forms of mon< 



156 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book HZ 

opoly, which will be considered in a subsequent cnapter 
(Chap. IV), and which exercise powers analogous to tax- 
ation. After we have discovered the laws of distribution 
we can then see what bearing, if any, taxation has upon 
them. 

We must discover these laws of distribution for our- 
selves — or, at least, two out of the three. For, that they 
are not, at least as a whole, correctly apprehended by the 
current political economy, may be seen, irrespective of 
our preceding examination of one of them, in any of 
the standard treatises. 

This is evident, in the first place, from the terminol- 
ogy employed. 

In all politico-economic works we are told that the 
three factors in production are land, labor, and capital, 
and that the whole produce is primarily distributed into 
three corresponding parts. Three terms, therefore, are 
needed, each of which shall clearly express one of these 
parts to the exclusion of the others. Eent, as defined, 
clearly enough expresses the first of these parts — that 
which goes to the owners of land. Wages, as defined, 
clearly enough expresses the second — that part which 
constitutes the return to labor. But as to the third 
term — that which should express the return to capital — 
there is in the standard works a most puzzling ambiguity 
and confusion. 

Of words in common use, that which comes nearest to 
exclusively expressing the idea of return for the use of 
capital, is interest, which, as commonly used, implies 
the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor 
in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, ex- 
cept such as may be involved in the security. The word 
profits, as commonly used, is almost synonymous with 
revenue; it means a gain, an amount received in excess 
of an amount expended, and frequently includes receipts 
that are properly rent; while it nearly always includes 



Chap. L THEIR NECESSARY RELATION. -j^gy 

receipts which are properly wages, as well as compensa- 
tions for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital. 
Unless extreme violence is done to the meaning of the 
word, it cannot, therefore, be used in political economy 
to signify that share of the produce which goes to capi- 
tal, in contradistinction to those parts which go to labor 
and to land owners. 

Now, all this is recognized in the standard works on 
political economy. Adam Smith well illustrates how 
wages and compensation for risk largely enter into prof- 
its, pointing out how the large profits of apothecaries 
and small retail dealers are in reality wages for their 
labor, and not interest on their capital; and how the 
great profits sometimes made in risky businesses, such as 
smuggling and the lumber trade, are really but compen- 
sations for risk, which, in the long run, reduce the 
returns to capital so used to the ordinary, or below the 
ordinary, rate. Similar illustrations are given in most of 
the subsequent works, where profit is formally defined in 
its common sense, with, perhaps, the exclusion of rent. 
In all these works, the reader is told that profits are 
made up of three elements — wages of superintendence, 
compensation for risk, and interest) or the return for the 
use of capital. 

Thus, neither in its common meaning nor in the mean- 
ing expressly assigned to it in the current political econ- 
omy, can profits have any place in the discussion of the 
distribution of wealth between the three factors of pro- 
duction. Either in its common meaning or in the mean- 
ing expressly assigned to it, to talk about the distribution 
of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of 
the division of mankind into men, women, and human 
beings. 

Yet this, to the utter bewilderment of the reader, is 
what is done in all the standard works. After formally 
decomposing profits into wages of superintendence, com- 



158 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

pensation for risk, and interest — the net return for the 
use of capital — they proceed to treat of the distribution 
of wealth between the ront of land, the wages of labor, 
and the profits of capital. 

I doubt not that there are thousands of men who have 
vainly puzzled their brains over this confusion of terms, 
and abandoned the effort in despair, thinking that as the 
fault could not be in such great thinkers, it must be in 
their own stupidity. If it is any consolation to such men 
they may turn to Buckle's "History of Civilization," and 
see how a man who certainly got a marvelously clear idea 
of what he read, and who had read carefully the principal 
economists from Smith down, was inextricably confused 
by this jumble of profits and interest. For Buckle (Vol. 
1, Chap. II, and notes) persistently speaks of the dis- 
tribution of wealth into rent, wages, interest, and profits. 

And this is not to be wondered at. For, after 
formally decomposing profits into wages of superintend- 
ence, insurance, and interest, these economists, in as- 
signing causes which fix the general rate of profit, speak 
of things which evidently affect only that part of profits 
which they have denominated interest; and then, in 
speaking of the rate of interest, either give the meaning- 
less formula of supply and demand, or speak of causes 
which affect the compensation for risk; evidently using 
the word in its common sense, and not in the economic 
sense they have assigned to it, from which compensation 
for risk is eliminated. If the reader will take up John 
Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy," and 
compare the chapter on Profits (Book II, Chap. 15) with 
the chapter on Interest (Book III, Chap. 23), he will see 
the confusion thus arising exemplified in the case of the 
most logical of English economists, in a more striking 
manner than I would like to characterize. 

Now, such men have not been led into such confusion 
of thought without a cause. If they, one after another, 



Chap. I. THEIR NECESSARY RELATION. 159 

have followed Dr. Adam Smith, as boys play "follow my 
leader," jumping where he jumped, and falling where 
he fell, it has been that there was a fence where he 
jumped and a hole where he fell. 

The difficulty from which this confusion has sprung is 
in the preaccepted theory of wages. For reasons which 
I have before assigned, it has seemed to them a self- 
evident truth that the wages of certain classes of laborers 
depended upon the ratio between capital and the num- 
ber of laborers. But there are certain kinds of reward 
for exertion to which this theory evidently will not 
apply, so the term wages has in use been contracted to 
include only wages in the narrow common sense. This 
being the case, if the term interest were used, as consist- 
ently with their definitions it should have been used, to 
represent the third part of the division of the produce, 
all rewards of personal exertion, save those of what are 
commonly called wage-workers, would clearly have been 
left out. But by treating the division of wealth as be- 
tween rent, wages, and profits, instead of between rent, 
wages, and interest, this difficulty is glossed over, all 
wages which will not fall under the preaccepted law of 
wages being vaguely grouped under profits, as wages of 
superintendence.' 

To read carefully what economists say about the dis- 
tribution of wealth is to see that, though they correctly 
define it, wages, as they use it in this connection, is what 
logicians would call an undistributed term — it does not 
mean all wages, but only some wages — viz., the wages of 
manual labor paid by an employer. So other wages are 
thrown over with the return to capital, and included 
under the term profits, and any clear distinction between 
the returns to capital and the returns to human exertion 
thus avoided. The fact is that the current political econ- 
omy fails to give any clear and consistent account of the 
distribution of wealth. The law of rent is clearly stated. 



160 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

but it stands unrelated. The rest is a confused and 
incoherent jumble. 

The very arrangement of these works shows this con- 
fusion and inconclusiveness of thought. In no politico- 
economic treatise that I know of are these laws of dis- 
tribution brought together, so that the reader can take 
them in at a glance and recognize their relation to each 
other; but what is said about each one is enveloped in a 
mass of political and moral reflections and dissertations. 
And the reason is not far to seek. To bring together the 
three laws of distribution as they are now taught, is to 
show at a glance that they lack necessary relation. 

The laws of the distribution of wealth are obviously 
laws of proportion, and must be so related to each otheT 
that any two being given the third may be inferred. 
For to say that one of the three parts of a whole is in- 
creased or decreased, is to say that one or both of the 
other parts is, reversely, decreased or increased. If Tom, 
Dick, and Harry are partners in business, the agreement 
which fixes the share of one in the profits must at the 
same time fix either the separate or the joint shares of 
the other tAVO. To fix Tom's share at forty per cent, is 
to leave but sixty per cent, to be divided between Dick 
and Harry. To fix Dick's share at forty per cent, and 
Harry's share at thirty-five per cent, is to fix Tom's share 
at twenty-five per cent. 

But between the laws of the distribution of wealth, as 
laid down in the standard works, there is no such rela- 
tion. If we fish them out and bring them together, we 
find them to be as follows: 

Wages are determined by the ratio between the amount 
of capital devoted to the payment and subsistence of 
labor and the number of laborers seeking employment. 

Eent is determined by the margin of cultivation; all 
lands yielding as rent that part of their produce which 
exceeds what an equal application of labor and capital 
could procure from the poorest land in use. 



Chap.L THEIR NECESSARY RELATION. 161 

Interest is determined by the equation between the de- 
mands of borrowers and the supply of capital offered by 
lenders. Or, if we take what is given as the law of prof- 
its, it is determined by wages, falling as wages rise and ris- 
ing as wages fall — or, to use the phrase of Mill, by the 
cost of labor to the capitalist. 

The bringing together of these current statements of 
the laws of the distribution of wealth shows at a glance 
that they lack the relation to each other which the true 
laws of distribution must have. They do not correlate 
and co-ordinate. Hence, at least two of these three laws 
are either wrongly apprehended or wrongly stated. This 
tallies with what we have already seen, that the current 
apprehension of the law of wages, and, inferentially, of 
the law of interest, will not bear examination. Let us, 
then, seek the true laws of the distribution of the prod- 
uce of labor into wages, rent, and interest. The proof 
that we have found them will be in their correlation — 
that they meet, and relate, and mutually bound each 
other. 

With profits this inquiry has manifestly nothing to do. 
We want to find what it is that determines the division 
of their joint produce between land, labor, and capital; 
and profits is not a term that refers exclusively to any 
one of these three divisions. Of the three parts into 
which profits are divided by political economists — 
namely, compensation for risk, wages of superintendence, 
and return for the use of capital — the latter falls under 
the term interest, which includes all the returns for the 
use of capital, and excludes everything else; wages of su- 
perintendence falls under the term wages, which includes 
all returns for human exertion, and excludes everything 
else; and compensation for risk has no place whatever, as 
risk is eliminated when all the transactions of a commu- 
nity are taken together. I shall, therefore, consistently 
with the definitions of political economists, use the term 



162 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

interest as signifying that part of the produce which goes 
to capital. 

To recapitulate: 

Land, labor, and capital are the factors of production. 
The term land includes all natural opportunities 01 
forces; the term labor, all human exertion; and the term 
capital, all wealth used to produce more wealth. In re- 
turns to these three factors is the whole produce dis- 
tributed. That part which goes to land owners as pay- 
ment for the use of natural opportunities is called rent; 
that part which constitutes the reward of human exer- 
tion is called wages; and that part which constitutes the 
return for the use of capital is called interest. These 
terms mutually exclude each other. The income of any 
individual may be made up from any one, two, or all 
three of these sources; but in the effort to discover the 
laws of distribution we must keep them separate. 

Let me premise the inquiry which we are about to un- 
dertake by saying that the miscarriage of political econ- 
omy, which I think has now been abundantly shown, can, 
it seems to me, be traced to the adoption of an erroneous 
standpoint. Living and making their observations in a 
state of society in which a capitalist generally rents land 
and hires labor, and thus seems to be the undertaker or 
first mover in production, the great cultivators of the 
science have been led to look upon capital as the prime 
factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor 
as its agent or tool. This is apparent on every page — in 
the form and course of their reasoning, in the character 
of their illustrations, and even in their choice of terms. 
Everywhere capital is the starting point, the capitalist 
the central figure. So far does this go that both Smith 
and Eicardo use the term "natural wages" to express the 
minimum upon which laborers can live; whereas, unless 
injustioe is natural, all that the laborer produces should 



Chap. I. THEIR NECESSARY RELATION. 163 

rather be held as his natural wages. This habit of look- 
ing upon capital as the employer of labor has led both to 
the theory that wages depend upon the relative abun- 
dance of capital, and to the theory that interest varies 
inversely with wages, while it has led away from truths 
that but for this habit would have been apparent. In 
short, the misstep which, so far as the great laws of dis- 
tribution are concerned, has led political economy into 
the jungles, instead of upon the mountain tops, was 
taken when Adam Smith, in his first book, left the 
standpoint indicated in the sentence, "The produce of 
labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages of 
labor/' to take that in which capital is considered as 
employing labor and paying wages. 

But when we consider the origin and natural sequence 
of things, this order is reversed; and capital instead of 
first is last; instead of being the employer of labor, it is 
in reality employed by labor. There must be land be- 
fore labor can be exerted, and labor must be exerted 
before capital can be produced. Capital is a result of 
labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further produc- 
tion. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is 
therefore the employer of capital. Labor can be exerted 
only upon land, and it is from land that the matter 
which it transmutes into wealth must be drawn. Land 
therefore is the condition precedent, the field and ma- 
terial of labor. The natural order is land, labor, capital; 
and, instead of starting from capital as our initial point, 
we should start from land. 

There is another thing to be observed. Capital is not 
a necessary factor in production. Labor exerted upon 
land can produce wealth without the aid of capital, and 
in the necessary genesis of things must so produce 
wealth before capital can exist. Therefore the law of 
rent and the law of wages must correlate each other and 
form a perfect whole without reference to the law of 



164 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

capital, as otherwise these laws would not fit the cases 
which can readily be imagined, and which to some degree 
actually exist, in which capital takes no part in produc- 
tion. And as capital is, as is often said, but stored-up 
labor, it is but a form of labor, a subdivision of the gen- 
eral term labor; and its law must be subordinate to, and 
independently correlate with, the law of wages, so as to 
fit cases in which the whole produce is divided between 
labor and capital, without any deduction for rent. To 
resort to the illustration before used: The division of the 
produce between land, labor and capital must be as it 
would be between Tom, Dick, and Harry, if Tom and 
Dick were the original partners, and Harry came in but 
as an assistant to and sharer with Dick. 



CHAPTER II. 

RENT AND THE LAW OF RENT. 

The term rent, in its economic sense — that is, when 
used, as I am using it, to distinguish that part of the 
produce which accrues to the owners of land or other 
natural capabilities by virtue of their ownership — differs 
in meaning from the word rent as commonly used. In 
some respects this economic meaning is narrower than 
the common meaning; in other respects it is wider. 

It is narrower in this: In common speech, we apply 
the word rent to payments for the use of buildings, ma- 
chinery, fixtures, etc., as well as to payments for the use 
of land or other natural capabilities; and in speaking of 
the rent of a house or the rent of a farm, we do not 
separate the price for the use of the improvements from 
the price for the use of the bare land. But in the eco- 
nomic meaning of rent, payments for the use of any of the 
products of human exertion are excluded, and of the 
lumped payments for the use of houses, farms, etc., only 
that part is rent which constitutes the consideration for 
the use of the land — that part paid for the use of build- 
ings or other improvements being properly interest, as it 
is a consideration for the use of capital. 

It is wider in this: In common speech we speak of rent 
only when owner and user are distinct persons. But in 
the economic sense there is also rent where the same per- 
son is both owner and user. Where owner and user are 
thus the same person, whatever part of his income he 
might obtain by letting the land to another is rent, while 
the return for his labor and capital are that part of his 



166 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book 1IL 

income which they would yield him did he hire instead 
of owning the land. Kent is also expressed in a selling 
price. When land is purchased, the payment which is 
made for the ownership, or right to perpetual use, is rent 
commuted or capitalized. If I buy land for a small price 
and hold it until I can sell it for a large price, I have 
become rich, not by wages for my labor or by interest 
upon my capital, but by the increase of rent. Eent, in 
short, is the share in the wealth produced which the ex- 
clusive right to the use of natural capabilities gives to 
the owner. Wherever land has an exchange value there 
is rent in the economic meaning of the term. Wherever 
land having a value is used, either by owner or hirer, 
there is rent actual; wherever it is not used, but still has 
a value, there is rent potential. It is this capacity of 
yielding rent which gives value to land. Until its own- 
ership will confer some advantage, land has no value.* 

Thus rent or land value does not arise from the pro- 
ductiveness or utility of land. It in no wise represents 
any help or advantage given to production, but simply 
the power of securing apart of the results of production. 
No matter what are its capabilities, land can yield no 
rent and have no value until some one is willing to give 
labor or the results of labor for the privilege of using it; 
and what any one will thus give depends not upon the 
capacity of the land, but upon its capacity as compared 
with that of land that can be had for nothing. I may 
have very rich land, but it will yield no rent and have no 
value so long as there is other land as good to be had 
without cost. But when this other land is appropriated, 
and the best land to be had for nothing is inferior, either 
in fertility, situation, or other quality, my land will begin 

* In speaking of the value of land I use and shall use the words 
as referring to the value of the bare land. When I wish to speak of 
the value of land and improvements I shall use those words. 



Chap.II. RENT AtfD THE LAW OF RENT. 167 

to have a value and yield rent. And though the pro- 
ductiveness of my land may decrease, yet if the produc- 
tiveness of the land to be had without charge decreases 
in greater proportion, the rent I can get, and conse- 
quently the value of my land, will steadily increase. 
Eent, in short, is the price of monopoly, arising from the 
reduction to individual ownership of natural elements 
which human exertion can neither produce nor increase. 
If one man owned all the land accessible to any com- 
munity, he could, of course, demand any price or condi- 
tion for its use that he saw fit; and, as long as his owner- 
ship was acknowledged, the other members of the com- 
munity would have but death or emigration as the alter- 
native to submission to his terms. This has been the 
case in many communities; but in the modern form of 
society, the land, though generally reduced to individ- 
ual ownership, is in the hands of too many different per- 
sons to permit the price which can be obtained for its 
use to be fixed by mere caprice or desire. While each 
individual owner tries to get all he can, there is a limit 
to what he can get, which constitutes the market price 
or market rent of the land, and which varies with differ- 
ent lands and at different times. The law, or relation, 
which, under these circumstances of free competition 
among all parties, the condition which in tracing out the 
principles of political economy is always to be assumed, 
determines what rent or price can be got by the owner, 
is styled the law of rent. This fixed with certainty, we 
have more than a starting point from which the laws 
which regulate wages and interest may be traced. For, 
as the distribution of wealth is a division, in ascertaining 
what fixes the share of the produce which goes as rent, 
we also ascertain what fixes the share which is left for 
wages, where there is no co-operation of capital; and what 
fixes the joint share left for wages and interest, where 
capital does co-operate in production. 



168 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

Fortunately, as to the law of rent there is no necessity 
for discussion. Authority here coincides with common 
sense,* and the accepted dictum of the current political 
economy has the self-evident character of a geometric 
axiom. This accepted law of rent, which John Stuart 
Mill denominates the po?is asinorum of political economy, 
is sometimes styled "Kicardo's law of rent/' from the 
fact that, although not the first to announce it, he first 
brought it prominently into notice, f It is: 

The rent of land is determined by the excess of its 
produce over that which the same amplication can secure 
from the least productive land in use. 

This law, which of course applies to land used for 
other purposes than agriculture, and to all natural 
agencies, such as mines, fisheries, etc., has been exhaust- 
ively explained and illustrated by all the leading econo- 
mists since Eicardo. But its mere statement has all the 
force of a self-evident proposition, for it is clear that the 
effect of competition is to make the lowest reward for 
which labor and capital will engage in production, the 
highest that they can claim; and hence to enable the 
owner of more productive land to appropriate in rent all 

* I do not mean to say that the accepted law of rent has never 
been disputed. In all the nonsense that in the present disjointed 
condition of the science has been printed as political economy, it 
would be hard to find anything that has not been disputed. But I 
mean to say that it has the sanction of all economic writers who are 
really to be regarded as authority. As John Stuart Mill says (Book 
II., Chap. XVI.), ''there are few persons who have refused their 
assent to it, except from not having thoroughly understood it. The 
loose and inaccurate way in which it is often apprehended by those 
who affect to refute it is very remarkable. " An observation which 
has received many later exemplifications. 

f According to McCulloch the law of rent was first stated in a 
pamphlet by Dr. James Anderson of Edinburgh in 1777, and simul- 
taneously in the beginning of this century by Sir Edward West, Mr, 
Malthus. and Mr. Ricardo. 



Chap. II. RENT AXD THE LAW OF KENT. 169 

the return above that required to recompense labor and 
capital at the ordinary rate — that is to say, what they can 
obtain upon the least productive land in use, or at the 
least productive point, where, of course, no rent is paid. 

Perhaps it may conduce to a fuller understanding of 
the law of rent to put it in this form: The ownership of 
a natural agent of production will give the power of ap- 
propriating so much of the wealth produced by the exer- 
tion of labor and capital upon it as exceeds the return 
which the same application of labor and capital could 
secure in the least productive occupation in which they 
freely engage. 

This, however, amounts to precisely the same thing, 
for there is no occupation in which labor and capital can 
engage which does not require the use of land; and, fur- 
thermore, the cultivation or other use of land will always 
be carried to as low a point of remuneration, all things 
considered, as is freely accepted in any other pursuit. 
Suppose, for instance, a community in which part of the 
labor and capital is devoted to agriculture and part to 
manufactures. The poorest land cultivated yields an 
average return which we will call 20, and 20 there- 
fore will be the average return to labor and capital, as 
well in manufactures as in agriculture. Suppose that 
from some permanent cause the return in manufactures 
is now reduced to 15. Clearly, the labor and capital 
engaged in manufactures will turn to agriculture; and 
the process will not stop until, either by the extension of 
cultivation to inferior lands or to inferior points on the 
same land, or by an increase in the relative value of man- 
ufactured products, owing to the diminution of produc- 
tion — or, as a matter of fact, by both processes — the yield 
to labor and capital in both pursuits has, all things con- 
sidered, been brought again to the same level, so that 
whatever be the final point of productiveness at which 
manufactures are still carried on, whether it be 18 



170 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

or 17 or 16, cultivation will also be extended to that 
point. And, thus, to say that rent will be the excess 
in productiveness over the yield at the margin, or 
lowest point, of cultivation, is the same thing as to say 
that it will be the excess of produce over what the same 
amount of labor and capital obtains in the least remuner- 
ative occupation. 

The law of rent is, in fact, but a deduction from the 
law of competition, and amounts simply to the assertion 
that as wages and interest tend to a common level, all 
that part of the general production of wealth which ex- 
ceeds what the labor and capital employed could have 
secured for themselves, if applied to the poorest natural 
agent in use, will go to land owners in the shape of rent. 
It rests, in the last analysis, upon the fundamental prin- 
ciple, which is to political economy what the attraction 
of gravitation is to physics — that men will seek to gratify 
their desires with the least exertion. 

This, then, is the law of rent. Although many stand- 
ard treatises follow too much the example of Eicardo, 
who seems to view it merely in its relation to agriculture, 
and in several places speaks of manufactures yielding no 
rent, when, in truth, manufactures and exchange yield 
the highest rents, as is evinced by the greater value of 
land in manufacturing and commercial cities, thus hid- 
ing the full importance of the law, yet, ever since the 
time of Ricardo, the law itself has been clearly appre- 
hended and fully recognized. But not so its corollaries. 
Plain as they are, the accepted doctrine of wages (backed 
and fortified not only as has been hitherto explained, 
but by considerations whose enormous weight will be seen 
when the logical conclusion toward which we are tending 
is reached) has hitherto prevented their recognition.* 



* Buckle (Chap. II., History of Civilization) recognizes the neces- 
sary relation between rent, interest, and wages, but evidently neve» 
worked it oit*. 



Chap. II. RENT AND THE LAW OF RENT. 171 

Yet, is it not as plain as the simplest geometrical demon- 
stration, that the corollary of the law of rent is the law 
of wages, where the division of the produce is simply be- 
tween rent and wages; or the law of wages and interest 
taken together, where the division is into rent, wages, 
and interest? Stated reversely, the law of rent is neces- 
sarily the law of wages and interest taken together, for 
it is the assertion, that no matter what be the production 
which results from the application of labor and capital, 
these two factors will receive in wages and interest only 
such part of the produce as they could have produced on 
land free to them without the payment of rent — that is, 
the least productive land or point in use. For, if, of the 
produce, all over the amount which labor and capital 
could secure from land for which no rent is paid must go 
to land owners as rent, then all that can be claimed by 
labor and capital as wages and interest is the amount 
which they could have secured from land yielding no rent. 

Or to put it in algebraic form: 

As Producer Kent +Wages+Interest, 

Therefore, Produce — Rent:=Wages+Interest. 

Thus wages and interest do not depend upon the prod- 
uce of labor and capital, but upon what is left after 
rent is taken out; or, upon the produce which they could 
obtain without paying rent — that is, from the poorest 
land in use. And hence, no matter what be the increase 
in productive power, if the increase in rent keeps pace 
with it, neither wages nor interest can increase. 

The moment this simple relation is recognized, a flood 
of light streams in upon what was before inexplicable, 
and seemingly discordant facts range themselves under 
an obvious law. The increase of rent which goes on in 
progressive countries is at once seen to be the key which 
explains why wages and interest fail to increase with in- 
crease of productive power. For the wealth produced 
in every community is divided into two parts by what 



172 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

may be called the rent line, which is fixed by the margin 
of cultivation, or the return which labor and capital could 
obtain from such natural opportunities as are free to 
them without the payment of rent. From the part of 
the produce below this line wages and interest must be 
paid. All that is above goes to the owners of land. 
Thus, where the value of land is low, there may be a 
small production of wealth, and yet a high rate of wages 
and interest, as we see in new countries. And, where the 
value of land is high, there may be a very large produc- 
tion of wealth, and yet a low rate of wages and interest, 
as we see in old countries. And, where productive power 
increases, as it is increasing in all progressive countries, 
wages and interest will be affected, not by the increase, 
but bv the manner in which rent is affected. If the 
value of land increases proportionately, all the increased 
production will be swallowed up by rent, and wages and 
interest will remain as before. If the value of land in- 
creases in greater ratio than productive power, rent will 
swallow up even more than the increase; and while the 
produce of labor and capital will be much larger, wages 
and interest will fall. It is only when the value of land 
fails to increase as rapidly as productive power, that wages 
and interest can increase with the increase of productive 
power. All this is exemplified in actual fact. 



CHAPTEE III. 

OF INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 

Having made sure of the law of rent, we have ob- 
tained as its necessary corollary the law of wages, where 
ihe division is between rent and wages; and the law of 
wages and interest taken together, where the division i? 
between the three factors. What proportion of the prod- 
uce is taken as rent must determine what proportion is 
left for wages, if but land and labor are concerned; or tc 
be divided between wages and interest, if capital joins in 
the production. 

But without reference to this deduction, let us seek 
each of these laws separately and independently. If, 
when obtained in this way, we find that they correlate, 
our conclusions will have the highest certainty. 

And, inasmuch as the discovery of the law of wages is 
the ultimate purpose of our inquiry, let us take up first 
the subject of interest. 

I have already referred to the difference in meaning 
between the terms profits and interest. It may be worth 
while, further, to say that interest, as an abstract term in 
the distribution of wealth, differs in meaning from the 
word as commonlv used, in this: That it includes all re- 
turns for the use of capital, and not merely those that 
pass from borrower to lender; and that it excludes com- 
pensation for risk, which forms so great a part of what is 
commonly called interest. Compensation for risk is evi- 
dently only an equalization of return between different 
employments of capital. What we want to find is, what 
fixes the general rate of interest proper? The different 



174 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION". Book III. 

rates of compensation for risk added to this will give the 
current rates of commercial interest. 

Now, it is evident that the greatest differences in what 
is ordinarily called interest are due to differences in risk; 
but it is also evident that between different countries and 
different times there are also considerable variations in 
the rate of interest proper. In California at one time 
two per cent, a month would not have been considered 
extravagant interest on security on which loans could 
now be effected at seven or eight per cent, per annum, 
and though some part of the difference may be due to an 
increased sense of general stability, the greater part is 
evidently due to some other general cause. In the 
United States generally the rate of interest has been 
higher than in England; and in the newer States of the 
Union higher than m the older States; and the tendency 
of interest to sink as society progresses is well marked 
and has long been noticed. What is the law which will 
bind all these variations together and exhibit their cause? 

It is not worth while to dwell more than has hitherto 
incidentally been done upon the failure of the current 
political economy to determine the true law of interest. 
Its speculations upon this subject have not the definite- 
ness and coherency which have enabled the accepted doc- 
trine of wages to withstand the evidence of fact, and do 
not require the same elaborate review. That they run 
counter to the facts is evident. That interest does not 
depend on the productiveness of labor and capital is 
proved by the general fact that where labor and capital 
are most productive interest is lowest. That it does not 
depend reversely upon wages (or the cost of labor), low- 
ering as wages rise, and increasing as wages fall, is proved 
by the general fact that interest is high when and where 
wages are high, and low when and where wages are low. 

Let us begin at the beginning. The nature and func- 
tions of capital have already been sufficiently shown, but 



Chap. 111. INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 175 

even at the risk of something like a digression, let us 
endeavor to ascertain the cause of interest before consid- 
ering its law. For in addition to aiding our inquiry by 
giving us a firmer and clearer grasp of the subject now 
in hand, it may lead to conclusions whose practical im- 
portance will be hereafter apparent. 

What is the reason and justification of interest? Why 
should the borrower pay back to the lender more than 
he received? These questions are worth answering, not 
merely from their speculative, but from their practical 
importance. The feeling that interest is the robbery of 
industry is widespread and growing, and on both sides of 
the Atlantic shows itself more and more in popular liter- 
ature and in popular movements. The expounders of 
the current political economy say that there is no conflict 
between labor and capital, and oppose as injurious to 
labor, as well as to capital, all schemes for restricting the 
reward which capital obtains; yet in the same works the 
doctrine is laid down that wages and interest bear to each 
other an inverse relation, and that interest will be low or 
high as wages are high or low.* Clearly, then, if this 
doctrine is correct, the only objection that from the 
standpoint of the laborer can be logically made to any 
scheme for the reduction of interest is that it will not 
work, which is manifestly very weak ground while ideas 
of the omnipotence of legislatures are yet so widespread; 
and though such an objection may lead to the abandon- 
ment of any one particular scheme, it will not prevent 
the search for another. 

Why should interest be? Interest, we are told, in all 
the standard works, is the reward of abstinence. But, 
manifestly, this does not sufficiently account for it. Ab- 
stinence is not an active, but a passive quality; it is not a 

* This is really said of profits, but with the evident meaning of 
returns to capital. 



176 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Booh lit. 

doing — it is simply a not doing. Abstinence in itself 
produces nothing. Why, then, should any part of what 
is produced be claimed for it? If I have a sum of money 
which I lock up for a year, I have exercised as much ab- 
stinence as though I had loaned it. Yet, though in the 
latter case I will expect it to be returned to me with an 
additional sum by way of interest, in the former I will 
have but the same sum, and no increase. But the ab- 
stinence is the same. If it be said that in lending it I 
do the borrower a service, it may be replied that he also 
does me a service in keeping it safely — a service that 
under some conditions may be very valuable, and for 
which I would willingly pay, rather than not have it; 
and a service which, as to some forms of capital, may be 
even more obvious than as to money. For there are 
many forms of capital which will not keep, but must be 
constantly renewed; and many which are onerous to 
maintain if one has no immediate use for them. So, if 
the accumulator of capital helps the user of capital by 
loaning it to him, does not the user discharge the debt 
in full when he hands it back? Is not the secure preser- 
vation, the maintenance, the re-creation of capital, a 
complete offset to the use? Accumulation is the end 
and aim of abstinence. Abstinence can go no further 
and accomplish no more; nor of itself can it even do 
this. If we were merely to abstain from using it, how 
much wealth would disappear in a year! And how little 
would be left at the end of two years! Hence, if more is 
demanded for abstinence than the safe return of capital, 
is not labor wronged? Such ideas as these underlie the 
widespread opinion that interest can accrue only at the 
expense of labor, and is in fact a robbery of labor which 
in a social condition based on justice would be abolished. 
The attempts to refute these views do not appear to me 
always successful. For instance, as it illustrates the 
usual reasoning, take Bastiat's oft-quoted illustration of 



Chap. III. INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 177 

the plane. One carpenter, James, at the expense of 
ten days' labor, makes himself a plane, which will last 
in use for 290 of the 300 working days of the year. 
William, another carpenter, proposes to borrow the 
plane for a year, offering to give back at the end of 
that time, when the plane will be worn out, a new 
plane equally as good. James objects to lending the 
plane on these terms, urging that if he merely gets back 
a plane he will have nothing to compensate him for the 
loss of the advantage which the use of the plane during 
the year would give him. William, admitting this, 
agrees not merely to return a plane, but, in addition, to 
give James a new plank. The agreement is carried out 
to mutual satisfaction. The plane is used up during the 
year, but at the end of the year James receives as good 
a one, and a plank in addition. He lends the new plane 
again and again, until finally it passes into the hands of 
his son, "who still continues to lend it," receiving a 
plank each time. This plank, which represents interest, 
is said to be a natural and equitable remuneration, as by 
giving it in return for the use of the plane, William 
"obtains the power which exists in the tool to increase 
the productiveness of labor," and is no worse off than he 
would have been had he not borrowed the plane; while 
James obtains no more than he would have had if he had 
retained and used the plane instead of lending it. 

Is this really so? It will be observed that it is not 
affirmed that James could make the plane and William 
could not, for that would be to make the plank the re- 
ward of superior skill. It is only that James had ab- 
stained from consuming the result of his labor until he 
had accumulated it in the form of a plane — which is the 
essential idea of capital. 

Now, if James had not lent the plane he could have 
used it for 290 days, when it would have bee*i worn out, 
and he would have been obliged to take the remaining 



178 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III. 

ten days of the working year to make a new plane. If 
William had not borrowed the plane he would have taken 
ten days to make himself a plane, which he could have 
used for the remaining 290 days. Thus, if we take a 
plank to represent the fruits of a day's labor with the 
aid of a plane, at the end of the year, had no borrowing 
taken place, each would have stood with reference to the 
plane as he commenced, James with a plane, and William 
with none, and each would have had as the result of the 
year's work 290 planks. If the condition of the borrow- 
ing had been what William first proposed, the return of 
a new plane, the same relative situation would have been 
secured. William would have worked for 290 days, and 
taken the last ten days to make the new plane to return 
to James. James would have taken the first ten days of 
the year to make another plane which would have lasted 
for 290 days, when he would have received a new plane 
from William. Thus, the simple return of the plane 
would have put each in the same position at the end of 
the year as if no borrowing had taken place. James 
would have lost nothing to the gain of William, and Will- 
iam would have gained nothing to the loss of James. 
Each would have had the return his labor would other- 
wise have yielded — viz., 290 planks, and James would 
have had the advantage with which he started, a new 
plane. 

But when, in addition to the return of a plane, a 
plank is given, James at the end of the year will be in a 
better position than if there had been no borrowing, and 
William in a worse. James will have 291 planks and a 
new plane, and William 289 planks and no plane. If 
William now borrows the plank as well as the plane on the 
same terms as before, he will at the end of the year have 
to return to James a plane, two planks and a fraction 
of a plank; and if this difference be again borrowed, and 
so on, is it not evident that the income of the one will 



Chap. III. INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 179 

progressively decline, and that of the other will progress- 
ively increase, until at length, if the operation be con- 
tinued, the time will come when, as the result of the 
original lending of a plane, James will obtain the whole 
result of William's labor — that is to say, William will be- 
come virtually his slave? 

Is interest, then, natural and equitable? There is 
nothing in this illustration to show it to be. Evidently 
what Bastiat (and many others) assigns as the basis of 
interest, "the power which exists in the tool to increase 
the productiveness of labor," is neither in justice nor in 
fact the basis of interest. The fallacy which makes 
Bastiat's illustration pass as conclusive with those who 
do not stop to analyze it, as we have done, is that with 
the loan of the plane they associate the transfer of the 
increased productive power which a plane gives to labor. 
But this is really not involved. The essential thing 
which James loaned to W r illiam was not the increased 
power which labor acquires from using planes. To sup- 
pose this, we should have to suppose that the making 
and using of planes was a trade secret or a patent right, 
when the illustration would become one of monopoly, 
not of capital. The essential thing which James loaned 
to William was not the privilege of applying his labor in 
a more effective way, but the use of the concrete result of 
ten days' labor. If "the power which exists in tools to 
increase the productiveness of labor" were the cause of 
interest, then the rate of interest would increase with 
the march of invention. This is not so c Nor yet will I 
be expected to pay more interest if I borrow a fifty-dollar 
sewing machine than if I borrow fifty dollars' worth of 
needles; if I borrow a steam engine than if I borrow a 
pile of bricks of equal value. Capital, like wealth, is 
interchangeable. It is not one thing; it is anything to 
that value within the circle of exchange. Nor yet does 
the improvement of tools add to the reproductive power 
of capital; it adds to the productive power of labor. 



180 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Boole III 

And I am inclined to think that if all wealth consisted 
of such things as planes, and all production was such as 
that of carpenters — that is to say, if wealth consisted but 
of the inert matter of the universe, and production of 
working up this inert matter into different shapes, that 
interest would be but the robbery of industry, and could 
not long exist. This is not to say that there would be no 
accumulation, for though the hope of increase is a 
motive for turning wealth into capital, it is not the 
motive, or, at least, not the main motive, for accumulat- 
ing. Children will save their pennies for Christmas; 
pirates will add to their buried treasure; Eastern princes 
will accumulate hoards of coin; and men like Stewart or 
Vanderbilt, having become once possessed of the passion 
of accumulating, would continue as long as they could to 
add to their millions, even though accumulation brought 
no increase. Nor yet is it to say that there would be no 
borrowing or lending, for this, to a large extent, would 
be prompted by mutual convenience. If William had a 
job of work to be immediately begun and James one that 
would not commence until ten days thereafter, there 
might be a mutual advantage in the loan of the plane, 
though no plank should be given. 

But all wealth is not of the nature of planes, or planks, 
or money, which has no reproductive power; nor is all 
production merely the turning into other forms of this 
inert matter of the universe. It is true that if I put 
away money, it will not increase. But suppose, instead, 
I put away wine. At the end of a year I will have an 
increased value, for the wine will have improved in 
quality. Or supposing that in a country adapted to 
them, I set out bees; at the end .of a year I will have 
more swarms of bees, and the honey which they have 
made. Or, supposing, where there is a range, I turn out 
sheep, or hogs, or cattle; at the end of the year I will, 
upon the average, also have an increase. 



Chap.IlL INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 181 

Now what gives the increase in these cases is some- 
thing which, though it generally requires labor to utilize 
it, is yet distinct and separable from labor — the active 
power of nature; the principle of growth, of reproduc- 
tion, which everywhere characterizes all the forms of 
that mysterious thing or condition which we call life. 
And it seems to me that it is this which is the cause of 
interest, or the increase of capital over and above that 
due to labor. There are, so to speak, in the movements 
which make up the everlasting flux of nature, certain 
vital currents, which will, if we use them, aid us, with a 
force independent of our own efforts, in turning matter 
into the forms we desire — that is to say, into wealth. 

While many things might be mentioned which, like 
money, or planes, or planks, or engines, or clothing, 
have no innate power of increase, yet other things are 
included in the terms wealth and capital which, like 
wine, will of themselves increase in quality up to a cer- 
tain point; or, like bees or cattle, will of themselves in- 
crease in quantity; and certain other things, such as 
seeds, which, though the conditions which enable them 
to increase may not be maintained without labor, yet 
will, when these conditions are maintained, yield an in- 
crease, or give a return over and above that which is to 
be attributed to labor. 

Now the interchangeability of wealth necessarily in- 
volves an average between all the species of wealth of 
any special advantage which accrues from the possession 
of any particular species, for no one would keep capital 
in one form when it could be changed into a more ad- 
vantageous form. No one, for instance, would grind 
wheat into flour and keep it on hand for the convenience 
of those who desire from time to time to exchange wheat 
or its equivalent for flour, unless he could by such ex- 
change secure an increase equal to that which, all things 
considered, he could secure by planting his wheat. No 



182 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book IIL 

one, if he could keep them, would exchange a flock of 
sheep now for their net weight in mutton to be returned 
next year; for by keeping the sheep he would not only 
have the same amount of mutton next year, but also the 
lambs and the fleeces. No one would dig an irrigating 
ditch, unless those who by its aid are enabled to utilize 
the reproductive forces of nature would give him such 
a portion of the increase they receive as to make his cap- 
ital yield him as much as theirs. And so, in any cir- 
cle of exchange, the power of increase which the repro- 
ductive or vital force of nature gives to some species of 
capital must average with all; and he who lends, or uses 
in exchange, money, or planes, or bricks, or clothing, is 
not deprived of the power to obtain an increase, any 
more than if he had lent or put to a reproductive use so 
much capital in a form capable of increase. 

There is also in the utilization of the variations in the 
powers of nature and of man which is effected by ex- 
change, an increase which somewhat resembles that pro- 
duced by the vital forces of nature. In one place, for 
instance, a given amount of labor will secure 200 in 
vegetable food or 100 in animal food. In another place, 
these conditions are reversed, and the same amount of 
labor will produce 100 in vegetable food or 200 in ani- 
mal. In the one place, the relative value of vegetable 
to animal food will be as two to one, and in the other as 
one to two; and, supposing equal amounts of each to be re- 
quired, the same amount of labor will in either place secure 
150 of both. But by devoting labor in the one place to 
the procurement of vegetable food, and in the other, to 
the procurement of animal food, and exchanging to the 
quantity required, the people of each place will be en- 
abled by the given amount of labor to procure 200 
of both, less the losses and expenses of exchange; so 
that in each place the produce which is taken from 
use and devoted to exchange brings back an increase. 



Chap. Ill INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 183 

Thus Whittington's cat, sent to a far country where cats 
are scarce and rats are plenty, returns in bales of goods 
and bags of gold. 

Of course, labor is necessary to exchange, as it is to 
the utilization of the reproductive forces of nature, and 
the produce of exchange, as the produce of agriculture, 
is clearly the produce of labor; but yet, in the one case 
as in the other, there is a distinguishable force co-operat- 
ing with that of labor, which makes it impossible to 
measure the result solely by the amount of labor ex- 
pended, but renders the amount of capital and the time 
it is in use integral parts in the sum of forces. Capital 
aids labor in all of the different modes of production, but 
there is a distinction between the relations of the two in 
such modes of production as consist merely of changing 
the form or place of matter, as planing boards or mining 
coal; and such modes of production as avail themselves 
of the reproductive forces of nature, or of the power 
of increase arising from differences in the distribu- 
tion of natural and human powers, such as the raising of 
grain or the exchange of ice for sugar. II. production 
of the first kind, labor alone is the efficient cause; when 
labor stops, production stops. When the carpenter 
drops his plane as the sun sets, the increase of value, 
which he with his plane is producing, ceases until he be- 
gins his labor again the following morning. When the 
factory bell rings for closing, when the mine is shut 
down, production ends until work is resumed. The in- 
tervening time, so far as regards production, might as 
well be blotted out. The lapse of days, the change of 
seasons is no element in the production that depends 
solely upon the amount of labor expended. But in the 
other modes of production to which I have referred, and 
in which the part of labor may be likened to the opera- 
tions of lumbermen who throw their logs into the 
stream, leaving it to the current to carry them to the 



184 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

boom of the sawmill many miles below, time is an ele- 
ment. The seed in the ground germinates and grows 
while the farmer sleeps or plows new fields, and the ever- 
flowing currents of air and ocean bear Whittington's cat 
toward the rat-tormented ruler in the regions of romance. 
To recur now to Bastiat's illustration. It is evident 
that if there is any reason why William at the end of the 
year should return to James more than an equally good 
plane, it does not spring, as Bastiat has it, from the in- 
creased power which the tool gives to labor, for that, as I 
have shown, is not an element; but it springs from the 
element of time — the difference of a year between the 
lending and return of the plane. Now, if the view is 
confined to the illustration, there is nothing to suggest 
how this element should operate, for a plane at the end 
of the year has no greater value than a plane at the be- 
ginning. But if we substitute for the plane a calf, it is 
clearly to be seen that to put James in as good a position 
as if he had not lent, William at the end of the year 
must return, not a calf, but a cow. Or, if we suppose 
that the ten days' labor had been devoted to planting 
corn, it is evident that James would not have been fully 
recompensed if at the end of the year he had received 
simply so much planted corn, for during the year the 
planted corn would have germinated and grown and mul- 
tiplied; and so if the plane had been devoted to ex- 
change, it might during the year have been turned over 
several times, each exchange yielding an increase to 
James* Now, therefore, as James' labor might have 
been applied in any of those ways — or what amounts to 
the same thing, some of the labor devoted to making 
planes might have been thus transferred — he will not 
mate* a plane for William to use for the year unless he 
gets back more than a plane. And William can afford to 
give back more th&n a plane, because the same general 
average of the advantages of labor applied in different 



Chap. III. INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 185 

modes will enable him to obtain from his labor an ad- 
vantage from the element of time. It is this general 
averaging, or as we may say, "pooling" of advantages, 
which necessarily takes place where the exigencies of 
society require the simultaneous carrying on of the differ- 
ent modes of production, which gives to the possession of 
wealth incapable in itself of increase an advantage simp 
lar to that which attaches to wealth used in such a waj/ 
as to gain from the element of time. And, in the last 
analysis, the advantage which is given by the lapse of 
time springs from the generative force of nature and the 
varying powers of nature and of man. 

Were the quality and capacity of matter everywhere 
uniform, and all productive power in man, there would 
be no interest. The advantage of superior tools might 
at times be transferred on terms resembling the payment 
of interest, but such transactions would be irregular and 
intermittent — the exception, not the rule. For the power 
of obtaining such returns would not, as now, inhere in 
the possession of capital, and the advantage of time 
would operate only in peculiar circumstances. That I, 
having a thousand dollars, can certainly let it out at in- 
terest, does not arise from the fact that there are others, 
not having a thousand dollars, who will gladly pay me 
for the use of it, if they can get it no other way; but 
from the fact that the capital which my thousand dollars 
represents has the power of yielding an increase to 
whomsoever has it, even though he be a millionaire. 
For the price which anything will bring does not depend 
upon what the buyer would be willing to give rather than 
go without it, so much as upon what the seller can other- 
wise get. For instance, a manufacturer who wishes to 
retire from business has machinery to the value of $100,- 
000. If he cannot, should he sell, take this $100,000 
and invest it so that it will yield him interest, it will 
be immaterial to him, risk being eliminated, whether ho 



186 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book ILL 

obtains the whole price at once or in installments, and if 
the purchaser has the requisite capital, which we must 
suppose in order that the transaction may rest on its own 
merits, it will be immaterial whether he pay at once or 
after a time. If the purchaser has not the required capital, 
it may be to his convenience that payments should be de- 
layed, but it would be only in exceptional circumstances 
that the seller would ask, or the buyer would consent, to 
pay any premium on this account; nor in such cases 
would this premium be properly interest. For interest 
is not properly a payment made for the use of capital, 
but a return accruing from the increase of capital. If 
the capital did not yield an increase, the cases would be 
few and exceptional in which the owner would get a 
premium. William would soon find out if it did not pay 
him to give a plank for the privilege of deferring pay- 
ment on James' plane. 

In short, when we come to analyze production we find 
it to fall into three modes — viz: 

Adapting, or changing natural products either inform 
*>r in place so as to fit them for the satisfaction of human 
desire. 

Growing, or utilizing the vital forces of nature, as by 
raising vegetables or animals. 

Exchanging, or utilizing, so as to add to the general 
4um of wealth, the higher powers of those natural forces 
which vary with locality, or of those human forces which 
vary with situation, occupation, or character. 

In each of these three modes of production capital 
may aid labor — or, to speak more precisely, in the first 
mode capital may aid labor, but is not absolutely necessary; 
in the others capital must aid labor, or is necessary. 

Now, while by adapting capital in proper forms we 
may increase the effective power of labor to impress 
upon matter the character of wealth, as when we adapt 
wood and iron to the form and use of a plane; or iron, 



Chap. Ill INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. 187 

coal, water, and oil to the form and use of a steam 
engine; or stone, clay, timber, and iron to that of a 
building, yet the characteristic of this use of capital is, 
that the benefit is in the use. When, however, we em- 
ploy capital in the second of these modes, as when we 
plant grain in the ground, or place animals on a stock 
farm, or put away wine to improve with age, the benefit 
arises, not from the use, but from the increase. And so, 
when we employ capital in the third of these modes, and 
instead of using a thing we exchange it, the benefit is in 
the increase or greater value of the things received in 
return. 

Primarily, the benefits which arise from use go to labor, 
and the benefits which arise from increase, to capital. 
But, inasmuch as the division of labor and the inter- 
changeability of wealth necessitate and imply an averag- 
ing of benefits, in so far as these different modes of pro- 
duction correlate with each other, the benefits that arise 
from one will average with the benefits that arise from 
the others, for neither labor nor capital will be devoted 
to any mode of production while any other mode which 
is open to them will yield a greater return. That is to 
say, labor expended in the first mode of production will 
get, not the whole return, but the return minus such part 
as is necessary to give to capital such an increase as it 
could have secured in the other modes of production, and 
capital engaged in the second and third modes will ob- 
tain, not the whole increase, but the increase minus what 
is sufficient to give to labor such reward as it could have 
secured if expended in the first mode. 

Thus interest springs from the power of increase which 
the reproductive forces of nature, and the in effect anal- 
ogous capacity for exchange, give to capital. It is not 
an arbitrary, but a natural thing; it is not the result of a 
particular social organization, but of laws of the universe 
which underlie society. It is, therefore, just. 



188 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION". Book ITL 

They who talk about abolishing interest fall into an 
error similar to that previously pointed out as giving its' 
plausibility to the doctrine that wages are drawn from 
capital. When they thus think of interest, they think 
only of that which is paid by the user of capital to the 
owner of capital. But, manifestly, this is not all inter- 
est, but only some interest. Whoever uses capital and 
obtains the increase it is capable of giving receives inter- 
est. If I plant and care for a tree until it comes to 
maturity, I receive, in its fruit, interest upon the capital 
I have thus accumulated — that is, the labor I have ex- 
pended. If I raise a cow, the milk which she yields me, 
morning and evening, is not merely the reward of the 
labor then exerted; but interest upon the capital which 
my labor, expended in raising her, has accumulated in 
the cow. And so, if I use my own capital in directly aid- 
ing production, as by machinery, or in indirectly aiding 
production, in exchange, I receive a special and dis- 
tinguishable advantage from the reproductive character 
of capital, which is as real, though perhaps not as clear, 
as though I had lent my capital to another and he had 
paid me interest. 



CHAPTER IV. 

OF SPURIOUS CAPITAL AND OF PROFITS OFTEN MISTAKEN 

FOR INTEREST. 

The belief that interest is the robbery of industry is, I 
am persuaded, in large part due to a failure to discrim- 
inate between what is really capital and what is not, and 
between profits which are properly interest and profits 
which arise from other sources than the use of capital. 
In the speech and literature of the day every one is 
styled a capitalist who possesses what, independent of 
his labor, will yield him a return, while whatever is thus 
received is spoken of as the earnings or takings of capi- 
tal, and we everywhere hear of the conflict of labor and 
capital. Whether there is, in reality, any conflict be- 
tween labor and capital, I do not yet ask the reader to 
make up his mind; but it will be well here to clear away 
some misapprehensions which confuse the judgment. 

Attention has already been called to the fact that land 
values, which constitute such an enormous part of what 
is commonly called capital, are not capital at all; and 
that rent, which is as commonly included in the receipts 
of capital, and which takes an ever-increasing portion of 
the produce of an advancing community, is not the earn- 
ings of capital, and must be carefully separated from in- 
terest. It is not necessary now to dwell further upon 
this point. Attention has likewise been called to the 
fact that the stocks, bonds, etc., which constitute an- 
other great part of what is commonly called capital, 
are not capital at all; but, in some of their shapes, these 
evidences of indebtedness so closely resemble capital^ 



190 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

and in some cases actually perform, or seem to perform, 
the functions of capital, while they yield a return to their 
owners which is not only spoken of as interest, but has 
every semblance of interest, that it is worth while, before 
attempting to clear the idea of interest from some other 
ambiguities that beset it, to speak again of these at 
greater length. 

Nothing can be capital, let it always be remembered, 
that is not wealth — that is to say, nothing can be capital 
that does not consist of actual, tangible things, not the 
spontaneous offerings of nature, which have in them- 
selves, and not by proxy, the power of directly or indi- 
rectly ministering to human desire. 

Thus, a government bond is not capital, nor yet is it 
the representative of capital. The capital that was once 
received for it by the government has been consumed un- 
productively — blown away from the mouths of cannon, 
used up in war ships, expended in keeping men march- 
ing and drilling, killing and destroying. The bond can- 
not represent capital that has been destroyed. It does 
not represent capital at all. It is simply a solemn decla- 
ration that the government will, some time or other, 
take by taxation from the then existing stock of the peo- 
ple, so much wealth, which it will turn over to the holder 
of the bond; and that, in the meanwhile, it will, from 
time to time, take, in the same way, enough to make up 
to the holder the increase which so much capital as it 
some day promises to give him would yield him were it 
actually in his possession. The immense sums which are 
thus taken from the produce of every modern country to 
pay interest on public debts are not the earnings or in- 
crease of capital — are not really interest in the strict 
sense of the term, but are taxes levied on the produce of 
labor and capital, leaving so much less for wages and so 
much less for real interest. 

But, supposing the bonds have been issued for the 



Chap. IV. OF SPURIOUS CAPITAL AND INTEREST. 191 

deepening of a riverbed, the construction of lighthouses, 
or the erection of a public market; or supposing, to em- 
body the same idea while changing the illustration, they 
have been issued by a railroad company. Here they do 
represent capital, existing and applied to productive 
uses, and like stock in a dividend paying company may 
be considered as evidences of the ownership of capital. 
But they can be so considered only in so far as they act- 
ually represent capital, and not as they have been issued 
in excess of the capital used. Nearly all our railroad 
companies and other incorporations are loaded down in 
this way. Where one dollar's worth of capital has been 
really used, certificates for two, three, four, five, or even 
ten, have been issued, and upon this fictitious amount 
interest or dividends are paid with more or less regu- 
larity. Now, what, in excess of the amount due as in- 
terest to the real capital invested, is thus earned by these 
companies and thus paid out, as well as the large sums 
absorbed by managing rings and never accounted for, is 
evidently not taken from the aggregate produce of the 
community on account of the services rendered by capi- 
tal — it is not interest. If we are restricted to the ter- 
minology of economic writers who decompose profits into 
interest, insurance, and wages of superintendence, it 
must fall into the category of wages of superintendence. 

But while wages of superintendence clearly enough 
include the income derived from such personal qualities 
as skill, tact, enterprise, organizing ability, inventive 
power, character, etc., to the profits we are speaking of 
there is another contributing element, which can only ar- 
bitrarily be classed with these — the element of monopoly. 

When James I. granted to his minion the exclusive 
privilege of making gold and silver thread, and prohib- 
ited, under severe penalties, every one else from making 
such thread, the income which Buckingham enjoyed in 
consequence did not arise from the interest upon tb* 



192 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

capital invested in the manufacture, nor from the skill, 
etc., of those who really conducted the operations, but 
from what he got from the king — viz., the exclusive 
privilege — in reality the power to levy a tax for his own 
purposes upon all the users of such thread. From a 
similar source comes a large part of the profits which 
are commonly confounded with the earnings of capital. 
Beceipts from the patents granted for a limited term of 
years for the purpose of encouraging invention are clearly 
attributable to this source, as are the returns derived from 
monopolies created by protective tariffs under the pre- 
tense of encouraging home industry. But there is an- 
other far more insidious and far more general form of 
monopoly. In the aggregation of large masses of capital 
under a common control there is developed a new and 
essentially different power from that power of increase 
which is a general characteristic of capital and which 
gives rise to interest. While the latter is, so to speak, 
constructive in its nature, the power which, as aggrega- 
tion proceeds, rises upon it is destructive. It is a power 
of the same kind as that which James granted to Buck- 
ingham, and it is often exercised with as reckless a dis- 
regard, not only of the industrial, but of the personal 
rights of individuals. A railroad company approaches a 
small town as a highwayman approaches his victim. 
The threat, "If you do not accede to our terms we will 
leave your town two or three miles to one side!" is as 
efficacious as the "Stand and deliver," when backed by 
a cocked pistol. For the threat of the railroad company 
is not merely to deprive the town of the benefits which 
the railroad might give; it is to put it in a far worse po- 
sition than if no railroad had been built. Or if, where 
there is water communication, an opposition boat is put 
on; rates are reduced until she is forced off, and then 
the public are compelled to pay the cost of the operation, 
just as the Kohillas were obliged to pay the forty lacs 



Chap. IV. OF SPURIOUS CAPITAL AND INTEREST. 193 

with which Surajah Dowlah hired of Warren Hastings an 
English force to assist him in desolating their country 
and decimating their people. And just as robbers unite 
to plunder in concert and divide the spoil, so do the 
trunk lines of railroad unite to raise rates and pool their 
earnings, or the Pacific roads form a combination with 
the Pacific Mail Steamship Company by which toll gates 
are virtually established on land and ocean. And just as 
Buckingham's creatures, under authority of the gold 
thread patent, searched private houses, and seized papers 
and persons for purposes of lust and extortion, so does 
the great telegraph company which, by the power of as- 
sociated capital deprives the people of the United States 
of the full benefits of a beneficent invention, tamper 
with correspondence and crush out newspapers which 
offend it. 

It is necessary only to allude to these things, not to 
dwell on them. Every one knows the tyranny and 
rapacity with which capital when concentrated in large 
amounts is frequently wielded to corrupt, to rob, and to 
destroy. What I wish to call the reader's attention to is 
that profits thus derived are not to be confounded with 
the legitimate returns of capital as an agent of produc- 
tion. They are for the most part to be attributed to a 
maladjustment of forces in the legislative department of 
government, and to a blind adherence to ancient barbar- 
isms and the superstitious reverence for the technicalities 
of a narrow profession in the administration of law; while 
the general cause which in advancing communities tends, 
with the concentration of wealth, to the concentration 
of power, is the solution of the great problem we are seek- 
ing for, but have not yet found. 

Any analysis will show that much of the profits which 
are, in common thought, confounded with interest are in 
reality due, not to the power of capital, but to the 
power of concentrated capital, or of concentrated capital 



194 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

acting upon bad social adjustments. And it will also 
show that what are clearly and properly wages of super- 
intendence are very frequently confounded with the 
earnings of capital. 

And, so, profits properly due to the elements of risk 
are frequently confounded with interest. Some people 
acquire wealth by taking chances which to the majority 
of people must necessarily bring loss. Such are many 
forms of speculation, and especially that mode of 
gambling known as stock dealing. Nerve, judgment, 
the possession of capital, skill in what in lower forms of 
gambling are known as the arts of the confidence man 
and blackleg, give advantage to the individual; but, 
just as at a gaming table, whatever one gains some one 
else must lose. 

Now, taking the great fortunes that are so often re- 
ferred to as exemplifying the accumulative power of capi- 
tal — the Dukes of Westminster and Marquises of Bute, 
the fiothschilds, Astors, Stewarts, Vanderbilts, Goulds, 
Stanfords, and Floods — it is upon examination readily 
seen that they have been built up, in greater or less part, 
not by interest, but by elements such as we have been 
reviewing. 

How necessary it is to note the distinctions to which I 
have been calling attention is shown in current discus- 
sions, where the shield seems alternately white or black 
as the standpoint is shifted from one side to the other. 
On the one hand we are called upon to see, in the exist- 
ence of deep poverty side by side with vast accumula- 
tions of wealth, the aggressions of capital on labor, and 
in reply it is pointed out that capital aids labor, and 
hence we are asked to conclude that there is nothing 
unjust or unnatural in the wide gulf between rich and 
poor; that wealth is but the reward of industry, intelli- 
gence, and thrift; and poverty but the punishment of 
indolence, ignorance, and imprudence. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE LAW OF INTEREST 

Let us turn now to the law of interest, keeping in 
mind two things to which attention has heretofore been 
called — viz: 

First — That it is not capital which employs labor, but 
labor which employs capital. 

Second — That capital is not a fixed quantity, but can 
always be increased or decreased, (1) by the greater or 
less application of labor to the production of capital, and 
(2) by the conversion of wealth into capital, or capital 
into wealth, for capital being but wealth applied in a cer- 
tain way, wealth is the larger and inclusive term. 

It is manifest that under conditions of freedom the 
maximum that can be given for the use of capital will be 
the increase it will bring, and the minimum or zero will 
be the replacement of capital; for above the one point 
the borrowing of capital would involve a loss, and below 
the other, capital could not be maintained. 

Observe, again: It is not, as is carelessly stated by 
some writers, the increased efficiency given to labor by 
the adaptation of capital to any special form or use which 
fixes this maximum, but the average power of increase 
which belongs to capital generally. The power of apply- 
ing itself in advantageous forms is a power of labor, 
.which capital as capital cannot claim nor share. A bow 
and arrows will enable an Indian to kill, let us say, a 
buffalo every day, while with sticks and stones he could 
hardly kill one in a week; but the weapon maker of the 
tribe could not claim from the hunter six out of every 



196 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

seven buffaloes killed as a return for the use of a bow 
and arrows; nor will capital invested in a woolen factory 
yield to the capitalist the difference between the produce 
of the factory and what the same amount of labor could 
have obtained with the spinning-wheel and handloom. 
William when he borrows a plane from James does not 
in that obtain the advantage of the increased efficiency of 
labor when using a plane for the smoothing of boards over 
what it has when smoothing them with a shell or flint. 
The progress of knowledge has made the advantage in- 
volved in the use of planes a common property and power 
of labor. What he gets from James is merely such ad- 
vantage as the element of a year's time will give to the 
possession of so much capital as is represented by the 
plane. 

Now, if the vital forces of nature which give an ad- 
vantage to the element of time be the cause of interest, 
it would seem to follow that this maximum rate of inter- 
est would be determined by the strength of these forces 
and the extent to which they are engaged in production. 
But while the reproductive force of nature seems to vary 
enormously, as, for instance, between the salmon, which 
spawns thousands of eggs, and the whale, which brings 
forth a single calf at intervals of years; between the rab- 
bit and the elephant, the thistle and the gigantic red- 
wood, it appears from the way the natural balance is 
maintained that there is an equation between the repro- 
ductive and destructive forces of nature, which in effect 
brings the principle of increase to a t jiiform point. This 
natural balance man has within narrow limits the power 
to disturb, and by the modification of natural conditions 
may avail himself at will of the varying strength of the. 
reproductive force in nature. But when he does so, 
there arises from the wide scope of his desires another 
principle which brings about in the increase of wealth a 
similar equation and balance to that which is effected in 



Chap. V. THE LAW OF INTEREST. 197 

nature between the different forms of life. This equa- 
tion exhibits itself through values. If, in a country 
adapted to both, I go to raising rabbits and you to rais- 
ing horses, my rabbits may, until the natural limit is 
reached, increase faster than your horses. But my capi- 
tal will not increase faster, for the effect of the varying 
rates of increase will be to lower the value of rabbits as 
compared with horses, and to increase the value of horses 
as compared with rabbits. 

Though the varying strength of the vital forces of 
nature is thus brought to uniformity, there may be a dif- 
ference in the different stages of social development as to 
the proportionate extent to which, in the aggregate pro- 
duction of wealth, these vital forces are enlisted. But 
as to this, there are two remarks to be made. In the 
first place, although in such a country as England the 
part taken by manufactures in the aggregate wealth pro- 
duction has very much increased as compared with the 
part taken by agriculture, yet it is to be noticed that to 
a very great extent this is true only of the political or 
geographical division, and not of the industrial commu- 
nity. For industrial communities are not limited by 
political divisions, or bounded by seas or mountains. 
They are limited only by the scope of their exchanges, 
and the proportion which in the industrial economy of 
England agriculture and stock-raising bear to maufac- 
tures is averaged with Iowa and Illinois, with Texas and 
California, with Canada and India, with Queensland and 
the Baltic — in short, with every country to which the 
world-wide exchanges of England extend. In the next 
place, it is to be remarked that although in the progress 
of civilization the tendency is to the relative increase of 
manufactures, as compared with agriculture, and con- 
sequently to a proportionately less reliance upon the 
reproductive forces of nature, yet this is accompanied 
by a corresponding extension of exchanges, and hence a 



198 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

greater calling in of the power of increase which thus 
arises. So these tendencies, to a great extent, and, prob- 
ably, so far as we have yet gone, completely, balance each 
other, and preserve the equilibrium which fixes the aver- 
age increase of capital, or the normal rate of interest. 

Now, this normal point of interest, which lies between 
the necessary maximum and the necessary minimum of 
the return to capital, must, wherever it rests, be such 
that all things (such as the feeling of security, desire for 
accumulation, etc.) considered, the reward of capital and 
the reward of labor will be equal — that is to say, will give 
an equally attractive result for the exertion or sacrifice 
involved. It is impossible, perhaps, to formulate this 
point, as wages are habitually estimated in quantity and 
interest in a ratio; but if we suppose a given quantity of 
wealth to be the produce of a given amount of labor, co- 
operating for a stated time with a certain amount of 
capital, the proportion in which the produce would be 
divided between the labor and the capital would afford 
a comparison. There must be such a point at, or rather, 
about, which the rate of interest must tend to settle; 
since, unless such an equilibrium were effected, labor 
would not accept the use of capital, or capital would not 
be placed at the disposal of labor. For labor and capital 
are but different forms of the same thing — human exer- 
tion. Capital is produced by labor; it is, in fact, but 
labor impressed upon matter — labor stored up in matter, 
to be released again as needed, as the heat of the sun 
stored up in coal is released in the furnace. The use of 
capital in production is, therefore, but a mode of labor. 
As capital can be used only by being consumed, its use 
is the expenditure of labor, and for the maintenance of 
capital, its production by labor must be commensurate 
with its consumption in aid of labor. Hence the prin- 
ciple that, under circumstances which permit free com- 
petition, operates to bring wages to a common standard 



Chap. V. THE LAW OF INTEREST. 199 

and profits to a substantial equality — the principle that 
men wiJl seek to gratify their desires with the least exer- 
tion — operates to establish and maintain this equilibrium 
between wages and interest. 

This natural relation between interest and wages — tnis 
equilibrium at which both will represent equal returns to 
equal exertions — may be stated in a form which suggests 
a relation of opposition; but this opposition is only ap- 
parent. In a partnership between Dick and Harry, the 
statement that Dick receives a certain proportion of 
the profits implies that the portion of Harry is less or 
greater as Dick's is greater or less; but where, as in this 
case, each gets only what he adds to the common fund, 
the increase of the portion of the one does not decrease 
what the other receives. 

And this relation fixed, it is evident that interest and 
wages must rise and fall together, and that interest can- 
not be increased without increasing wages; nor wages 
lowered without depressing interest. For if wages fall, 
interest must also fall in proportion, else it becomes 
more profitable to turn labor into capital than to apply 
it directly; while, if interest falls, wages must likewise 
proportionately fall, or else the increment of capital 
would be checked. 

We are, of course, not speaking of particular wages 
and particular interest, but of the general rate of wages 
and the general rate of interest, meaning always by inter- 
est the return which capital can secure, less insurance 
and wages of superintendence. In a particular case, or 
a particular employment, the tendency of wages and in- 
terest to an equilibrium may be impeded; but between the 
general rate of wages and the general rate of interest, 
this tendency must be prompt to act. For though in a 
particular branch of producton the line may be clearly 
drawn between those who furnish labor and those who 
furnish carjitaL jet even in communities where there is 



200 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book 111 

the sharpest distinction between the general class labor- 
ers and the general class capitalists, these two classes 
shade off into each other by imperceptible gradations, 
and on the extremes where the two classes meet in the 
same persons, the interaction which restores equilibrium, 
or rather prevents its disturbance, can go on without ob- 
struction, whatever obstacles may exist where the separa- 
tion is complete. And, furthermore, it must be remem- 
bered, as has before been stated, that capital is but a 
portion of wealth, distinguished from wealth generally 
only by the purpose to which it is applied, and, hence, 
the whole body of wealth has upon the relations of capi- 
tal and labor the same equalizing effect that a fly-wheel 
has upon the motion of machiLo y, taking up capital 
when it is in excess and giving it out again when there 
is a deficiency, just as a jeweler may give his wife dia- 
monds to wear when he has a superabundant stock, and 
put them in his showcase again when his stock becomes 
reduced. Thus any tendency on the part of interest to 
rise above the equilibrium with wages must immediately 
beget not only a tendency to direct labor to the produc- 
tion of capital, but also the application of wealth to the 
uses of capital; while any tendency of wages to rise above 
the equilibrium with interest must in like manner beget 
not only a tendency to turn labor from the production of 
capital, but also to lessen the proportion of capital by 
diverting from a productive to a non-productive use 
some of the articles of wealth of which capital is com- 
posed. 

To recapitulate: There is a certain relation or ratio be- 
tween wages and interest, fixed by causes, which, if not 
absolutely permanent, slowly change, at which enough 
labor will be turned into capital to supply the capital 
which, in the degree of knowledge, state of the arts, 
density of population, character of occupations, variety, 
extent and rapidity of exchanges- will be demanded for 



Chap. V. THE LAW OF INTEREST. 201 

production, and this relation or ratio the interaction of 
labor and capital constantly maintains; hence interest 
must rise and fall with the rise and fall of wages. 

To illustrate: The price of flour is determined by the 
price of wheat and cost of milling. The cost of milling 
varies slowly and but little, the difference being, even at 
long intervals, hardly perceptible; while the price of 
wheat varies frequently and largely. Hence we correctly 
say that the price of flour is governed- by the price of 
wheat. Or, to put the proposition in the same form as 
the preceding: There is a certain relation or ratio be- 
tween the value of wheat and the value of flour, fixed by 
the cost of milling, which relation or ratio the interac- 
tion between the demand for flour and the supply of 
wheat constantly maintains; hence the price of flour 
must rise and fall with the rise and fall of the price of 
wheat. 

Or, as, leaving the connecting link, the price of wheat, 
to inference, we say that the price of flour depends upon 
the character of the seasons, wars, etc., so may we put the 
law of interest in a form which directly connects it with 
the law of rent, by saying that the general rate of interest 
will be determined by the return to capital upon the poor- 
est land to which capital is freely applied — that is to say, 
upon the best land open to it without the payment of 
rent. Thus we bring the law of interest into a form 
which shows it to be a corollary of the law of rent. 

We may prove this conclusion in another way: For 
that interest must decrease as rent increases, we can 
plainly see if we eliminate wages. To do this, we must, 
to be sure, imagine a universe organized on totally differ- 
ent principles. Nevertheless, we may imagine what 
Carlyle would call a fool's paradise, where the production 
of wealth went on without the aid of labor, and solely by 
the reproductive force of capital — where sheep bore 
ready-made clothing on their backs, cows presented but- 



202 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

ter and cheese, and oxen, when they got to the proper 
point of fatness, carved themselves into beefsteaks and 
roasting ribs; where houses grew from the seed, and a 
jackknife thrown upon the ground would take root and 
in due time bear a crop of assorted cutlery. Imagine 
certain capitalists transported, with their capital in ap- 
propriate forms, to such a place. Manifestly, they would 
get, as the return for their capital, the whole amount of 
wealth it produced only so long as none of its produce 
was demanded as rent. When rent arose, it would 
come out of the produce of capital, and as it increased, 
the return to the owners of capital must necessarily 
diminish. If we imagine the place where capital pos- 
sessed this power of producing wealth without the aid of 
labor to be of limited extent, say an island, we shall see 
that as soon as capital had increased to the limit of the 
island to support it, the return to capital must fall to a 
trifle above its minimum of mere replacement, and the 
land owners would receive nearly the whole produce as 
rent, for the only alternative capitalists would have 
would be to throw their capital into the sea. Or, if we 
imagine such an island to be in communication with the 
rest of the world, the return to capital would settle at the 
rate of return in other places. Interest there would be 
neither higher nor lower than anywhere else. Kent would 
obtain the whole of the superior advantage, and the 
land of such an island would have a great value. 
To sum up, the law of interest is this: 

The relation between wages and interest is determined 
by the average power of increase which attaches to capital 
from its use in reproductive modes. As rent arises, in- 
terest will fall as wages fall, or will be determined by the 
margin of cultivation. 

I have endeavored at this length to trace out and illus- 
trate the law of interest more in deference to the existing 



Chap. V. THE LAW OF INTEREST. 203 

terminology and modes of thought than from the real 
necessities of our inquiry, were it unembarrassed by be- 
fogging discussions. In truth, the primary division of 
wealth in distribution is dual, not tripartite. Capital is 
but a form of labor, and its distinction from labor is in 
reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labor into 
skilled and unskilled would be. In our examination we 
have reached the same point as would have been attained 
had we simply treated capital as a form of labor, and 
sought the law which divides the' produce between rent 
and wages; that is to say, between the possessors of the 
two factors, natural substances and powers, and human 
exertion — which two factors by their union produce all 
wealth. 



CHAPTEK VI. 

WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 

We have by inference already obtained the law of 
wages. But to verify the deduction and to strip the 
subject of all ambiguities, let us seek the law from an 
independent starting point. 

There is, of course, no such thing as a common rate of 
wages, in the sense that there is at any given time and 
place a common rate of interest. Wages, which include 
all returns received from labor, not only vary with the 
differing powers of individuals, but, as the organization 
of society becomes elaborate, vary largely as between 
occupations. Nevertheless, there is a certain general 
relation between all wages, so that we express a clear and 
well-understood idea when we say that wages are higher 
or lower in one time or place than in another. In their 
degrees, wages rise and fall in obedience to a common 
law. What is this law? 

The fundamental principle of human action — the law 
that is to political economy what the law of gravitation 
is to physics — is that men seek to gratify their desires 
with the least exertion. Evidently, this principle must 
bring to an equality, through the competition it induces, 
the reward gained by equal exertions under similar cir- 
cumstances. When men work for themselves, thi? 
equalization will be largely affected by the equation of 
prices; and between those who work for themselves and 
those who work for others, the same tendency to equali- 
zation will operate. Now, under this principle, what, in 
conditions of freedom, will be the terms at which one 
man can hire others to work for him? Evidently, they 



Chap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 205 

will be fixed by what the men could make if laboring for 
themselves. The principle which will prevent him from 
having to give anything above this, except what is neces- 
sary to induce the change, will also prevent them from 
taking less. Did they demand more, the competition of 
others would prevent them from getting employment. 
Did he offer less, none would accept the terms, as they 
could obtain greater results by working for themselves. 
Thus, although the employer w r ishes to pay as little as 
possible, and the employee to receive as much as possi- 
ble, wages will be fixed by the value or produce of such 
labor to the laborers themselves. If wages are tempo- 
rarily carried either above or below this line, a tendency 
to carry them back at once arises. 

But the result, or the earnings of labor, as is readily 
seen in those primary and fundamental occupations in 
which labor first engages, and which, even in the most 
highly developed condition of society, still form the base 
of production, does not depend merely upon the inten- 
sity or quality of the labor itself. Wealth is the product 
of two factors, land and labor, and what a given amount 
of labor will yield will vary with the powers of the 
natural opportunities to which it is applied. This being 
the case, the principle that men seek to gratify their de- 
sires with the least exertion will fix wages at the produce 
of such labor at the point of highest natural productive- 
ness open to it. Now, by virtue of the same principle, 
the highest point of natural productiveness open to 
labor under existing conditions will be the lowest point 
at which production continues, for men, impelled by a 
supreme law of the human mind to seek the satisfaction 
of their desires with the least exertion, will not expend 
labor at a lower point of productiveness while a higher is 
open to them. Thus the wages which an employer must 
pay will be measured by the lowest point of natural pro- 
ductiveness to which production extends, and wages will' 
rise or fall as this point rises or falls. 



206 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book 1IL 

To illustrate: In a simple state of society, each man, 
as is the primitive mode, works for himself — some in 
hunting, let us say, some in fishing, some in cultivating 
the ground. Cultivation, we will suppose, has just be- 
gun, and the land in use is all of the same quality, yield- 
ing a similar return to similar exertions. Wages, there- 
fore — for, though there is neither employer nor em- 
ployed, there are yet wages — will be the full produce of 
labor, and, making allowance for the difference of agree- 
ableness, risk, etc., in the three pursuits, they will be on 
the average equal in each — that is to say, equal exertions 
will yield equal results. Now, if one of their number 
wishes to employ some of his fellows to work for him in- 
stead of for themselves, he must pay wages fixed by this 
full, average produce of labor. 

Let a period of time elapse. Cultivation has ex- 
tended, and, instead of land of the same quality, em- 
braces lands of different qualities. Wages, now, will not 
be as before, the average produce of labor. They will be 
the average produce of labor at the margin of cultiva- 
tion, or the point of lowest return. For, as men seek to 
satisfy their desires with the least possible exertion, the 
point of lowest return in cultivation must yield to labor 
a return equivalent to the average return in hunting and 
fishing.* Labor will no longer yield equal returns to 
equal exertions, but those who expend their labor on the 
superior land will obtain a greater produce for the same 
exertion than those who cultivate the inferior land. 
Wages, however, will still be equal, for this excess which 
the cultivators of the superior land receive is in reality 
rent, and if land has been subjected to individual owner- 
ship will give it a value. Now, if, under these changed 
circumstances, one member of this community wishes to 
hire others to work for him, he will have to pay only 

* This equalization will be effected by the equation of prices. 



Chap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 207 

what the labor yields at the lowest point of cultivation. 
If thereafter the margin of cultivation sinks to points of 
lower and lower productiveness, so must wages sink; if, 
on the contrary, it rises, so also must wages rise; for, 
just as a free body tends to take the shortest route to 
the earth's center, so do men seek the easiest mode to 
the gratification of their desires. 

Here, then, we have the law of wages, as a deduction 
from a principle most obvious and most universal. That 
wages depend upon the margin of cultivation — that they 
will be greater or less as the produce which labor can ob- 
tain from the highest natural opportunities open to it is 
greater or less, flows from the principle that men will 
seek to satisfy their wants with the least exertion. 

Now, if we turn from simple social states to the complex, 
phenomena of highly civilized societies, we shall find. 
upon examination that they also fall under this law. 

In such societies, wages differ widely, but they still 
bear a more or less definite and obvious relation to each 
other. This relation is not invariable, as at one time a 
philosopher of repute may earn by his lectures many fold 
the wages of the best mechanic, and at another can 
hardly hope for the pay of a footman; as in a great city 
occupations may yield relatively high wages, which in a 
new settlement would yield relatively low wages; yet 
these variations between wages may, under all conditions, 
and in spite of arbitrary divergences caused by custom, 
law, etc., be traced to certain circumstances. In one of 
his most interesting chapters Adam Smith thus enumer- 
ates the principal circumstances "which make up for a 
small pecuniary gain in some employments and counter- 
balance a great one in others: First, the agreeableness or 
disagreeableness of the employments themselves. Sec- 
ondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and 
expense of learning them. Thirdly, the constancy or in- 
constancy of employment in them. Fourthly, the small 



20o THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

or great trust which must be reposed in them. Fifthly, 
the probability or improbability of success in them." * It 
is not necessary to dwell in detail on these causes of vari- 
ation in wages between different employments. They 
have been admirably explained and illustrated by Adam 
Smith and the economists who have followed him, who 
have well worked out the details, even if they have failed 
to apprehend the main law. 

The effect of all the circumstances which give rise to 
the differences between wages in different occupations 
may be included as supply and demand, and it is per- 
fectly correct to say that the wages in different occupa- 
tions will vary relatively according to differences in the 
supply and demand of labor — meaning by demand the 
call which the community as a whole makes for services 
of the particular kind, and by supply the relative amount 
of labor which, under the existing conditions, can be de- 
termined to the performance of those particular services. 
But though this is true as to the relative differences of 
wages, when it is said, as is commonly said, that the gen- 
eral rate of wages is determined by supply and demand, 
the words are meaningless. For supply and demand are 
but relative terms. The supply of labor can only mean 
labor offered in exchange for labor or the produce of 
labor, and the demand,for labor can only mean labor or 
the produce of labor offered in exchange for labor. Sup- 
ply is thus demand, and demand supply, and, in the whole 
community, one must be co-extensive with the other. 
This is clearly apprehended by the current political econ- 
omy in relation to sales, and the reasoning of Eicardo, 
Mill, and others, which proves that alterations in supply 
and demand cannot produce a general rise or fall of 

* This last, which is analogous to the element of risk in profits, 
accounts for the high wages of successful lawyers, physicians, con 
factors, actors, etc 



Chap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 209 

values,, though they may cause a rise or fall in the value 
of a particular thing, is as applicable to labor. What 
conceals the absurdity of speaking generally of supply 
and demand in reference to labor is the habit of consid- 
ering the demand for labor as springing from capital and 
as something distinct from labor; but the analysis to 
which this idea has been heretofore subjected has suffi- 
ciently shown its fallacy. It is indeed evident from the 
mere statement, that wages can never permanently ex- 
ceed the produce of labor, and hence that there is no 
fund from which wages can for any time be drawn, save 
that which labor constantly creates. 

But, though all the circumstances which produce the 
differences in wages between occupations may be consid- 
ered as operating through supply and demand, they, or 
rather, their effects, for sometimes the same cause oper- 
ates in both ways, may be separated into two classes, ac- 
cording as they tend only to raise apparent wages or as 
they tend to raise real wages — that is, to increase the 
average reward for equal exertion. The high wages of 
some occupations much resemble what Adam Smith com- 
pares them to, the prizes of a lottery, in which the great 
gain of one is made up from the losses of many others. 
This is not only true of the professions by means of 
which Dr. Smith illustrates the principle, but is largely 
true of the wages of superintendence in mercantile pur- 
suits, as shown by the fact that over ninety per cent, of 
the mercantile firms that commence business ultimately 
fail. The higher wages of those occupations which can 
be prosecuted only in certain states of the weather, or 
are otherwise intermittent and uncertain, are also of 
this class; while differences that arise from hardship, 
discredit, unhealthiness, etc., imply differences of sac- 
rifice, the increased compensation for which only pre- 
serves the level of equal returns for equal exertions. All 
these differences are, in fact, equalizations, arising from 



210 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Booh III 

circumstances which, to use the words of Adam Smith, 
"make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employ- 
ments and counterbalance a great one in others. " But, 
besides these merely apparent differences, there are real 
differences in wages between occupations, which are 
caused by the greater or less rarity of the^ qualities re- 
quired — greater abilities or skill, whether natural or 
acquired, commanding on the average greater wages. 
Now, these qualities, whether natural or acquired, are 
essentially analogous to differences in strength and quick- 
ness in manual labor, and as in manual labor the higher 
wages paid the man who can do more would be based 
upon wages paid to those who can do only the average 
amount, so wages in the occupations requiring superior 
abilities and skill must depend upon the common wages 
paid for ordinary abilities and skill. 

It is, indeed, evident from observation, as it must be 
from theory, that whatever be the circumstances which 
produce the differences of wages in different occupations, 
and although they frequently vary in relation to each 
other, producing, as between time and time, and place 
and place, greater or less relative differences, yet the rate 
of wages in one occupation is always dependent on the 
rate in another, and so on, down, until the lowest and 
widest stratum of wages is reached, in occupations where 
the demand is more nearly uniform and in which there is 
the greatest freedom to engage. 

For, although barriers of greater or less difficulty may 
exist, the amount of labor which can be determined to 
any particular pursuit is nowhere absolutely fixed. All 
mechanics could act as laborers, and many laborers could 
readily become mechanics; all storekeepers could act as 
shopmen, and many shopmen could easily become store- 
keepers; many farmers would, upon inducement, become 
hunters or miners, fishermen or sailors, and many hunt- 
ers, miners, fishermen, and sailors know enough of farm- 



Chap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 211 

ing to turn their hands to it on demand. In each 
occupation there are men who unite it with others, or 
who alternate between occupations, while the young men 
who are constantly coming in to fill up the ranks of labor 
are drawn in the direction of the strongest inducements 
and least resistances. And further than this, all the 
gradations of wages shade into each other by imperceptible 
degrees, instead of being separated by clearly defined 
gulfs. The wages, even of the poorer paid mechanics, 
are generally higher than the wages of simple laborers, 
but there are always some mechanics who do not, on the 
whole, make as much as some laborers; the best paid 
lawyers receive much higher wages than the best paid 
clerks, but the best paid clerks make more than some 
lawyers, and in fact the worst paid clerks make more 
than the worst paid lawyers. Thus, on the verge of each 
occupation, stand those to whom the inducements be- 
tween one occupation and another are so nicely balanced 
that the slightest change is sufficient to determine their 
labor in one direction or another. Thus, any increase or 
decrease in the demand for labor of a certain kind can- 
not, except temporarily, raise wages in that occupation 
above, nor depress them below, the relative level with 
wages in other occupations, which is determined by the 
circujustances previously adverted to, such as relative 
agreeableness or continuity of employment, etc. Even, 
as experience shows, where artificial barriers are imposed 
to this interaction, such as limiting laws, guild regula- 
tions, the establishment of caste, etc., they may inter- 
fere with, but cannot prevent, the maintenance of this 
equilibrium. They operate only as dams, which pile up 
the water of a stream above its natural level, but cannot 
prevent its overflow. 

Thus, although they may from time to time alter in 
relation to each other, as the circumstances which deter- 
mine relative levels change, yet it is evident that wages 



212 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III. 

in all strata must ultimately depend upon wages in the 
lowest and widest stratum — the general rate of wages 
rising or falling as these rise or fall. 

Now, the primary and fundamental occupations, upon 
which, so to speak, all others are built up, are evidently 
those which procure wealth directly from nature; hence 
the law of wages in them must be the general law of 
wages. And, as wages in such occupations clearly de- 
pend upon what labor can produce at the lowest point of 
natural productiveness to which it is habitually applied; 
therefore, wages generally depend upon the margin of 
cultivation, or, to pat it more exactly, upon the highest 
point of natural productiveness to which labor is free to 
apply itself without the payment of rent. 

So obvious is this law that it is often apprehended 
without being recognized. It is frequently said of such 
countries as California and Nevada that cheap labor 
would enormously aid their development, as it would en- 
able the working of the poorer but most extensive 
deposits of ore. A relation between low wages and a 
low point of production is perceived by those who talk 
in this way, but they invert cause and effect. It is not 
low wages which will cause the working of low-grade ore, 
but the extension of production to the lower point which 
will diminish wages. If wages could be arbitrarily forced 
down, as has sometimes been attempted by statute, the 
poorer mines would not be worked so long as richer 
mines could be worked. But if the margin of produc- 
tion were arbitrarily forced down, as it might be, were 
the superior natural opportunities in the ownership of 
those who chose rather to wait for future increase of 
value than to permit them to be used now, wages would 
necessarilv fall. 

The demonstration is complete. The law of wages we 
have thus obtained is that which we previously obtained 



Chap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 213 

as the corollary of the law of rent, and it completely 
harmonizes with the law of interest. It is, that: 

Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon 
the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of 
natural productiveness open to it without the payment of 
rent. 

This law of wages accords with and explains universal 
facts that without its apprehension seem unrelated and 
contradictory. It shows that: 

Where land is free and labor is unassisted, by capital, 
the whole produce will go to labor as wages. 

Where land is free and labor is assisted by capital, 
wages will consist of the whole produce, less that part 
hecessary to induce the storing up of labor as capital. 

Where land is subject to ownership and rent arises, 
wages will be fixed by what labor could secure from the 
highest natural opportunities open to it without the 
payment of rent. 

Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, 
wages may be forced by the competition among laborers 
to the minimum at which laborers will consent to repro- 
duce. 

This necessary 'minimum of wages (which by Smith 
and Eicardo is denominated the point of "natural 
wages," and by Mill supposed to regulate wages, which 
will be higher or lower as the working classes consent to 
reproduce at a higher or lower standard of comfort) is, 
however, included in the law of wages as previously 
stated, as it is evident that the margin of production 
cannot fall below that point at which enough will be left 
as wages to secure the maintenance of labor. 

Like Kicardo's law of rent of which it is the corollary, 
this law of wages carries with it its own proof and be- 
comes self-evident by mere statement. For it is but an 
application of the central truth that is the foundation of 



214 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

economic reasoning — that men will seek to satisfy their 
desires with the least exertion. The average man will 
not work for an employer for less, all things considered, 
than he can earn by working for himself; nor yet will he 
work for himself for less than he can earn by working 
for an employer, and hence the return which labor can 
secure from such natural opportunities as are free to it 
must fix the wages which labor everywhere gets. That 
is to say, the line of rent is the necessary measure of the 
line of wages. In fact, the accepted law of rent depends 
for its recognition upon a previous, though in many cases 
it seems to be an unconscious, acceptance of this law of 
wages. What makes it evident that land of a particu- 
lar quality will yield as rent the surplus of its produce 
over that of the least productive land in use, is the ap- 
prehension of the fact that the owner of the higher 
quality of land can procure the labor to work his land by 
the payment of what that labor could produce if exerted 
upon land of the poorer quality. 

In its simpler manifestations, this law of wages is rec- 
ognized by people who do not trouble themselves about 
political economy, just as the fact that a heavy body 
would fall to the earth was long recognized by those who 
never thought of the law of gravitation. It does not re- 
quire a philosopher to see that if in any country natural 
opportunities were thrown open which would enable 
laborers to make for themselves wages higher than the 
lowest now paid, the general rate of wages would rise; 
while the most ignorant and stupid of the placer miners 
of early California knew that as the placers gave out or 
were monopolized, wages must fall. It requires no fine- 
spun theory to explain why wages are so high relatively 
to production in new countries where land is yet unmo- 
nopolized. The cause is on the surface. One man will 
not work for another for less than his labor will really 
yield, when he can go upon the next quarter section and 



Oiap. VI. WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. 215 

take up a farm for himself. It is only as land becomes 
monopolized and these natural opportunities are shut off 
from labor, that laborers are obliged to compete with 
each other for employment, and it becomes possible for 
the farmer to hire hands to do his work while he main- 
tains himself on the difference between what their labor 
produces and what he pays them for it. 

Adam Smith himself saw the cause of high wages where 
land was yet open to settlement, though he failed to ap- 
preciate the importance and connection of the fact. In 
treating of the Causes of the Prosperity of New Colonies 
(Chapter VII, Book IV, "Wealth of Nations/') he says: 

" Every colonist gets more land than he can possibly cultivate. 
He has no rent and scarce any taxes to pay. * * He is eager, 
therefore, to collect laborers from every quarter and to pay them the 
most liberal wages. But these liberal wages, joined to the plenty 
and cheapness of land, soon make these laborers leave him in order 
to become landlords themselves, and to reward with equal liberality 
other laborers who soon leave them for the same reason they left 
their first masters." 

This chapter contains numerous expressions which, 
like the opening sentence in the chapter on The Wages 
of Labor, show that Adam Smith failed to appreciate 
the true laws of the distribution of wealth only because 
he turned away from the more primitive forms of society 
to look for first principles amid complex social manifes- 
tations, where he was blinded by a pre-accepted theory 
of the functions of capital, and, as it seems to me, by a 
vague acceptance of the doctrine which, two years after 
his death, was formulated by Malthus. And it is impos- 
sible to read the works of the economists who since the 
time of Smith have endeavored to build up and elucidate 
the science of political economy without seeing how, over 
and over again, they stumble over the law of wages with- 
out once recognizing it. Yet, "if it were a dog it would 
bite them!" Indeed, it is difficult to resist the impres- 



216 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book III 

sion that some of them really saw this law of wages, but, 
fearful of the practical conclusions to which it would 
lead, preferred to ignore and cover it up, rather than use 
it as the key to problems which without it are so perplex- 
ing. A great truth to an age which has rejected and 
trampled on it, is not a word of peace, but a sword! 

Perhaps it may be well to remind the reader, before 
closing this chapter, of what has been before stated — 
that I am using the word wages not in the sense of a 
quantity, but in the sense of a proportion. When I say 
that wages fall as rent rises, I do not mean that the 
quantity of wealth obtained by laborers as wages is nec- 
essarily less, but that the proportion which it bears to 
the whole produce is necessarily less. The proportion 
may diminish while the quantity remains the same or 
even increases. If the margin of cultivation descends 
from the productive point which we will call 25, to 
the productive point we will call 20, the rent of all 
lands that before paid rent will increase by this differ- 
ence, and the proportion of the whole produce which 
goes to laborers as wages will to the same extent dimin- 
ish; but if, in the meantime, the advance of the arts or 
the economies that become possible with greater popula- 
tion have so increased the productive power of labor that 
at 20 the same exertion will produce as much wealth 
as before at 25, laborers will get as wages as great a 
quantity as before, and the relative fall of wages will 
not be noticeable in any diminution of the necessaries 
or comforts of the laborer, but only in the- increased 
value of land and the greater incomes and more lavish 
expenditure of the rent-receiving class. 



CHAPTEK VII. 

THE CORRELATION AND CO-ORDINATION OF THESE LAWS. 

The conclusions we have reached as to the laws which 
govern the distribution of wealth recast a large and most 
important part of the science of political economy, as at 
present taught, overthrowing some of its most highly 
elaborated theories and shedding a new light on some of 
its most important problems. Yet, in doing this, no 
disputable ground has been occupied; not a single funda- 
mental principle advanced that is not already recognized. 

The law of interest and the law of wages which we 
have substituted for those now taught are necessary de- 
ductions from the great law which alone makes any 
science of political economy possible — the all-compelling 
law that is as inseparable from the human mind as at- 
traction is inseparable from matter, and without which 
it would be impossible to previse or calculate upon any 
human action, the most trivial or the most important. 
This fundamental law, that men seek to gratify their de- 
sires with the least exertion, becomes, when viewed in its 
relation to one of the factors of production, the law of 
rent; in relation to another, the law of interest; and in 
relation to a third, the law of wages. And in accepting 
the law of rent, which, since the time of Eicardo, has 
been accepted by every economist of standing, and 
which, like a geometrical axiom, has but to be under- 
stood to compel assent, the law of interest and law of 
wages, as I have stated them, are inferentially accepted, 
as its necessary sequences. In fact, it is only relatively 
that they can be called sequences, as in the recognition 
of the law of rent they too must be recognized. For on 



218 



THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. 



Book IIL 



what depends the recognition of the law of rent? Evi- 
dently upon the recognition of the fact that the effect of 
competition is to prevent the return to labor and capital 
being anywhere greater than upon the poorest land in 
use. It is in seeing this that we see that the owner of 
land will be able to claim as rent all of its produce which 
exceeds what would be yielded to an equal application of 
labor and capital on the poorest land in use. 

The harmony and correlation of the laws of distribu- 
tion as we have now apprehended them are in striking 
contrast with the want of harmony which characterizes 
these laws as presented by the current political economy. 
Let us state them side by side: 



The Current Statement. 

Rent depends on the margin 
of cultivation, rising as it 
falls and falling as it rises. 

Wages depend upon the 
ratio between the number 
of laborers and the amount 
of capital devoted to their 
employment. 

Interest depends upon the 
equation between the sup- 
ply of and demand for 
capital; or, as is stated of 
profits, upon wages (or 
the cost of labor), rising 
as wages fall, and falling 



The True Statement. 

Rent depends on the margin 
of cultivation, rising as it 
falls and falling as it rises. 

Wages depend on the mar- 
gin of cultivation, falling 
as it falls and rising as it 
rises. 



Interest (its ratio with wa- 
ges being fixed by the net 
power of increase which 
attaches to capital) de- 
pends on the margin of 
cultivation, falling as it 
falls and rising as it rises, 
as wages rise, 

In the current statement the laws of distribution have 
no common center, no mutual relation; they are not the 
correlating divisions of a whole, but measures of differ- 
ent qualities. In the statement we have given, they 
spring from one point, support and supplement each 
other, and form the correlating divisions of a complete 
whole. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE STATICS OF THE PROBLEM THUS EXPLAINED. 

We have now obtained a clear, simple, and consistent 
theory of the distribution of wealth, which accords with 
first principles and existing facts, and which, when under- 
stood, will commend itself as self-evident. 

Before working out this theory, I have deemed it nec- 
essary to show conclusively the insufficiency of current 
theories; for, in thought, as in action, the majority of 
men do but follow their leaders, and a theory of wages 
which has not merely the support of the highest names, 
but is firmly rooted in common opinions and prejudices, 
will, until it has been proved untenable, prevent any 
other theory from being even considered, just as the 
theory that the earth was the center of the universe pre- 
vented any consideration of the theory that it revolves 
on its own axis and circles round the sun, until it was 
clearly shown that the apparent movements of the 
heavenly bodies could not be explained in accordance 
with the theory of the fixity of the earth. 

There is in truth a marked resemblance between the 
ecience of political economy, as at present taught, and 
the science of astronomy, as taught previous to the rec- 
ognition of the Copernican theory. The devices by 
which the current political economy endeavors to explain 
the social phenomena that are now forcing themselves 
upon the attention of the civilized world may well be 
compared to the elaborate system of cycles and epicycles 
constructed by the learned to explain the celestial phe- 
nomena in a manner according with the dogmas of author- 



220 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. Book IH 

ity and the rude impressions and prejudices of the un- 
learned. And, just as the observations which showed 
that this theory of cycles and epicycles could not explain 
all the phenomena of the heavens cleared the way for 
the consideration of the simpler theory that supplanted 
it, so will a recognition of the inadequacy of the current 
theories to account for social phenomena clear the way 
for the consideration of a theory that will give to polit- 
ical economy all the simplicity and harmony which the 
Copernican theory gave to the science of astronomy. 

But at this point the parallel ceases. That "the fixed 
and steadfast earth" should be really whirling through 
space with inconceivable velocity is repugnant to the 
first apprehensions of men in every state and situation; 
but the truth I wish to make clear is naturally perceived, 
and has been recognized in the infancy of every people, 
being obscured only by the complexities of the civilized 
state, the warpings of selfish interests, and the false di- 
rection which the speculations of the learned have taken. 
To recognize it, we have but to come back to first prin- 
ciples and heed simple perceptions. Nothing can be 
clearer than the proposition that the failure of wages to 
increase with increasing productive power is due to the 
increase of rent. 

Three things unite to production — labor, capital, and 
land. 

Three parties divide the produce — the laborer, the 
capitalist, and the land owner. 

If, with an increase of production the laborer gets no 
more and the capitalist no more it is a necessary infer- 
ence that the land owner reaps the whole gain. 

And the facts agree with the inference. Though 
neither wages nor interest anywhere increase as material 
progress goes on, yet the invariable accompaniment and 
mark of material progress is the increase of rent — the 
rise of land values. 



Chap. VIII. STATICS OF THE PROBLEM EXPLAINED. 221 

The increase of rent explains why wages and interest 
do not increase. The cause which gives to the land 
holder is the cause which denies to the laborer and capi- 
talist. That wages and interest are higher in new than 
in old countries is not, as the standard economists say v 
because nature makes a greater return to the application 
of labor and capital, but because land is cheaper, and, 
therefore, as a smaller proportion of the return is taken 
by rent, labor and capital can keep for their share a 
larger proportion of what nature does return. It is not 
the total produce, but the net produce, after rent has 
been taken from it, that determines what can be divided 
as wages and interest. Hence, the rate of wages and in- 
terest is everywhere fixed, not so much by the produc- 
tiveness of labor as by the value of land. Wherever the 
value of land is relatively low, wages and interest are 
relatively high; wherever land is relatively high, wages 
and interest are relatively low. 

If production had not passed the simple stage in which 
all labor is directly applied to the land and all wages are 
paid in its produce, the fact that when the land owner 
takes a larger portion the laborer must put up with a 
smaller portion could not be lost sight of. 

But the complexities of production in the civilized 
state, in which so great a part is borne by exchange, and 
so much labor is bestowed upon materials after they have 
been separated from the land, though they may to the 
unthinking disguise, do not alter the fact that all pro- 
duction is still the union of the two factors, land and 
labor, and that rent (the share of the land holder) can- 
not be increased except at the expense of wages (the 
share of the laborer) and interest (the share of capital). 
Just as the portion of the crop, which in the simpler 
forms of industrial organization the owner of agricul- 
tural land receives at the end of the harvest as his rent, 
\jssens the amount left to the cultivator as wages and 



222 THE LAWS OF DISTKIBUTION*. Book III. 

interest, so does the rental of land on which a manufac- 
turing or commercial city is built lessen the amount 
which can be divided as wages and interest between the 
laborer and capital there engaged in the production and 
exchange of wealth. 

In short, the value of land depending wholly upon the 
power which its ownership gives of appropriating wealth 
created by labor, the increase of land values is always at 
the expense of the value of labor. And, hence, that the 
increase of productive power does not increase wages, is 
because it does increase the value of land. Rent swal- 
lows up the whole gain and pauperism accompanies 
progress. 

It is unnecessary to refer to facts. They will suggest 
themselves to the reader. It is the general fact, observ- 
able everywhere, that as the value of land increases, so 
does the contrast between wealth and want appear. It is 
the universal fact, that where the value of land is high- 
est, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side 
with the most piteous destitution. To see human beings 
in the most abject, the most helpless and hopeless con- 
dition, you must go, not to the unfenced prairies and the 
log cabins of new clearings in the backwoods, where man 
single-handed is commencing the struggle with nature, 
and land is yet worth nothing, but to the great cities, 
where the ownership of a little patch of ground is a 
fortune. 



BOOK IV. 



EFFECT OF MATEEIAL PKOGKESS UPON THE 
DISTEIBUTION OF WEALTH. 



CHAPTER I. — THE DYNAMICS OF THE PROBLEM YET TO 

SEEK. 
CHAPTER II. — EFFECT OF INCREASE OF POPULATION UPON 

THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 
CHAPTER III. — EFFECT OF IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS 

UPON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 
CHAPTER IV. — EFFECT OF THE EXPECTATION RAISED BY 

MATERIAL PROGRESS, 



Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet 
made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. — John 
Stuart Mill. 



Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, 

Ere the sorrow comes with years? 
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, 

And that cannot stop their tears. 
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows; 

The young birds are chirping in the nest; 
The young fawns are playing with the shadows; 

The young flowers are blowing toward the west — 
Bat the young, young children, O, my brothers, 

They are weeping bitterly! 
They are weeping in the playtime of the others, 
In the country of the free. 

— Mrs. Browning. 






CHAPTER I. 

THE DYNAMICS OF THE PROBLEM YET TO SEEK 

In identifying rent as the receiver of the increased pro- 
duction which material progress gives, but which labor 
fails to obtain; in seeing that the antagonism of interests 
is not between labor and capital, as is popularly believed, 
but is in reality between labor and capital on the one side 
and land ownership on the other, we have reached a con- 
clusion that has most important practical bearings. But 
it is not worth while to dwell on them now, for we have 
not yet fully solved the problem which was at the outset 
proposed. To say that wages remain low because rent 
advances is like saying that a steamboat moves because 
its wheels turn around. The further question is, What 
causes rent to advance? What is the force or necessity 
that, as productive power increases, distributes a greater 
and greater proportion of the produce as rent? 

The only cause pointed out by Eicardo as advancing 
rent is the increase of population, which by requiring 
larger supplies of food necessitates the extension of culti- 
vation to inferior lands, or to points of inferior produc- 
sion on the same lands, and in current works of other 
authors attention is so exclusively directed to the exten- 
sion of production from superior to inferior lands as the 
cause of advancing rents that Mr. Carey (followed by 
Professor Perry and others) has imagined that he has 
overthrown the Bicardian theory of rent by denying that 
the progress of agriculture is from better to worse lands.* 

* As to this, it may be worth while to say: (1) That the general 
fact, as shown by the progress of agriculture in the newer States of 



226 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book U, 

Now, while it is unquestionably true that the increas. 
ing pressure of population which compels a resort to in- 
ferior points of production will raise rents, and does 
raise rents, I do not think that all the deductions com- 
monly made from this principle are valid, nor yet that it 
fully accounts for the increase of rent as material prog- 
ress goes on. There are evidently other causes which 
conspire to raise rent, but which seem to have been 
wholly or partially hidden by the erroneous views as to 
the functions of capital and genesis of wages which have 
been current. To see what these are, and how they 
operate, let us trace the effect of material progress upon 
the distribution of wealth. 

The changes which constitute or contribute to material 
progress are three: (1) increase in population; (2) im- 
provements in the arts of production and exchange; and 
(3) improvements in knowledge, education, government, 
police, manners, and morals, so far as they increase the 
power of producing wealth. Material progress, as com- 
monly understood, consists of these three elements or 
directions of progression, in all of which the progressive 
nations have for some time past been advancing, though 
in different degrees. As, considered in the light of ma- 

the Union and by the character of the land left out of cultivation in 
the older, is that the course of cultivation is from the better to the 
worse qualities of land. (2) That, whether the course of production 
be from the absolutely better to the absolutely worse lands or the 
reverse (and there is much to indicate that better or worse in this 
connection merely relates to our knowledge, and that future advances 
may discover compensating qualities in portions of the earth now 
esteemed most sterile), it is always, and from the nature of the human 
mind, must always tend to be, from land under existing conditions 
deemed better, to land under existing conditions deemed worse. (3) 
That Ricardo's law of rent does not depend upon the direction of the 
extension of cultivation, but upon the proposition that if land of a 
certain quality will yield something, land of a better quality will 
yield more 



Chap. J DYNAMICS OF THE PROBLEM YET TO SEEK. 227 

terial forces or economies, the increase of knowledge, the 
betterment of government, etc., have the same effect as 
improvements in the arts, it will not be necessary in this 
view to consider them separately. What bearing intel- 
lectual or moral progress, merely as such, has upon our 
problem we may hereafter consider. We are at present 
dealing with material progress, to which these things 
contribute only as they increase wealth-producing power, 
and shall see their effects when we see the effect of 
improvements in the arts. 

To ascertain the effects of material progress upon the 
distribution of wealth, let us, therefore, consider the 
effects of increase of population apart from improvement 
in the arts, and then the effect of improvement in the 
arts apart from increase of population. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE EFFECT OF INCREASE OF POPULATION UPON THE 
DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 

The manner in which increasing population advances 
rent, as explained and illustrated in current treatises, is 
that the increased demand for subsistence forces pro- 
duction to inferior soil or to inferior productive points. 
Thus, if, with a given population, the margin of cultiva- 
tion is at 30, all lands of productive power over 30 will 
pay rent. If the population be doubled, an additional 
supply is required, which cannot be obtained without an 
extension of cultivation that will cause lands to yield 
rent that before yielded none. If the extension be to 20, 
then all the land between 20 and 30 will yield rent and 
have a value, and all land over 30 will yield increased 
rent and have increased value. 

It is here that the Malthusian doctrine receives from 
the current elucidations of the theory of rent the sup- 
port of which I spoke when enumerating the causes that 
have combined to give that doctrine an almost undis- 
puted sway in current thought. According to the Mal- 
thusian theory, the pressure of population against sub- 
sistence becomes progressively harder as population 
increases, and although two hands come into the world 
with every new mouth, it becomes, to use the language 
of John Stuart Mill, harder and harder for the new 
hands to supply the new mouths. According to Kicardo's 
theory of rent, rent arises from the difference in produc- 
tiveness of the lands in use, and as explained by Ricardo 
and the economists who have followed him, the advance 



Chap. II. INCREASE OF POPULATION. 229 

in rents which, experience shows, accompanies increasing 
population, is caused by the inability of procuring more 
food except at a greater cost, which thus forces the mar- 
gin of population to lower and lower points of produc- 
tion, commensurately increasing rent. Thus the two 
theories, as I have before explained, are made to har- 
monize and blend, the law of rent becoming but a special 
application of the more general law propounded by Mal- 
.thus, and the advance of rents with increasing popula- 
tion a demonstration of its resistless operation. I refer 
to this incidentally, because it now lies in our way to see 
the misapprehension which has enlisted the doctrine of 
rent in the support of a theory to which it in reality 
gives no countenance. The Malthusian theory has been 
already disposed of, and the cumulative disproof which 
will prevent the recurrence of a lingering doubt will be 
given when it is shown, further on, that the phenomena 
attributed to the pressure of population against subsist- 
ence would, under existing conditions, manifest them- 
selves were population to remain stationary. 

The misapprehension to which I now refer, and which, 
to a proper understanding of the effect of increase of 
population upon the distribution of wealth, it is neces- 
sary to clear up, is the presumption, expressed or implied 
in all the current reasoning upon the subject of rent in 
connection with population, that the recourse to lower 
points of production involves a smaller aggregate produce 
in proportion to the labor expended; though that this is 
not always the case is clearly recognized in connection 
with agricultural improvements, which, to use the words 
of Mill, are considered "as a partial relaxation of the 
bonds which confine the increase of population. " But it 
is not involved even where there is no advance in the 
arts, and the recourse to lower points of production is 
clearly the result of the increased demand of an increased 
population. For increased population, of itself, and 



230 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IP. 

without any advance in the arts, implies an increase in 
the productive power of labor. The labor of 100 men, 
other things being equal, will produce much more than 
one hundred times as much as the labor of one man, and 
the labor of 1,000 men much more than ten times as 
much as the labor of 100 men; and, so, with every addi- 
tional pair of hands which increasing population brings, 
there is a more than proportionate addition to the pro- 
ductive power of labor. Thus, with an increasing popu- 
lation, there may be a recourse to lower natural powers 
of production, not only without any diminution in the 
average production of wealth as compared to labor, but 
without any diminution at the lowest point. If popu- 
lation be doubled, land of but 20 productiveness may 
yield to the same amount of labor as much as land 
of 30 productiveness could before yield. For it must 
not be forgotten (what often is forgotten) that the 
productiveness either of land or labor is not to be meas- 
ured in any one thing, but in all desired things. A 
settler and his family may raise as much corn on land 
a hundred miles away from the nearest habitation 
as they could raise were their land in the center of a 
populous district. But in the populous district they 
could obtain with the same labor as good a living from 
much poorer land, or from land of equal quality could 
make as good a living after paying a high rent, because 
in the midst of a large population their labor would have 
become more effective; not, perhaps, in the production 
of corn, but in the production of wealth generally — or 
the obtaining of all the commodities and services which 
are the real object of their labor. 

But even where there is a diminution in the produc- 
tiveness of labor at the lowest point — that is to say, 
where the increasing demand for wealth has driven pro- 
duction to a lower point of natural productiveness than 
the addition to the power of labor from increasing popu* 



Chap. II. INCREASE OF POPULATION". 231 

lation suffices to make up for — it does not follow that the 
aggregate production, as compared with the aggregate 
labor, has been lessened. 

Let us suppose land of diminishing qualities. The best 
would naturally be settled first, and as population in- 
creased production would take in the next lower quality, 
and so on. But, as the increase of population, by per- 
mitting greater economies, adds to the effectiveness of 
labor, the cause which brought each quality of land suc- 
cessively into cultivation would at the same time increase 
the amount of wealth that the same quality of labor 
could produce from it. But it would also do more than 
this — it would increase the power of producing wealth 
on all the superior lands already in cultivation. If the 
relations of quantity and quality were such that increas- 
ing population added to the effectiveness of labor faster 
than it compelled a resort to less productive qualities of 
land, though the margin of cultivation would fall and 
rent would rise, the minimum return to labor would in- 
crease. That is to say, though wages as a proportion 
would fall, wages as a quantity would rise. The average 
production of wealth would increase. If the relations 
were such that the increasing effectiveness of labor just 
compensated for the diminishing productiveness of the 
land as it was called into use, the effect of increasing 
population would be to increase rent by lowering the 
margin of cultivation without reducing wages as a 
quantity, and to increase the average production. If we 
now suppose population still increasing, but, between 
the poorest quality of land in use and the next lower 
quality, to be a difference so great that the increased 
power of labor which comes with the increased popula- 
tion that brings it into cultivation cannot compensate 
for it — the minimum return to labor will be reduced, and 
with the rise of rents, wages will fall, not only as a pro* 
portion* but as a quantity But unless the descent in 



232 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. BooJc IV. 

the quality of land is far more precipitous than we can 
well imagine, or than, I think, ever exists, the average 
production will still be increased, for the increased effect- 
iveness which comes by reason of the increased popula- 
tion that compels resort to the inferior quality of land 
attaches to all labor, and the gain on the superior quali- 
ties of land will more than compensate for the diminished 
production on the quality last brought in. The aggre- 
gate wealth production, as compared with the aggregate 
expenditure of labor, will be greater, though its distribu- 
tion will be more unequal. 

Thus, increase of population, as it operates to extend 
production to lower natural levels, operates to increase 
rent and reduce wages as a proportion, and may or may 
not reduce wages as a quantity; while it seldom can, and 
probably never does, reduce the aggregate production of 
wealth as compared with the aggregate expenditure of 
labor, but on the contrary increases, and frequently 
largely increases it. 

But while the increase of population thus increases 
rent by lowering the margin of cultivation, it is a mis- 
take to look upon this as the only mode by which rent 
advances as population grows. Increasing population 
increases rent, without reducing the margin of cultiva- 
tion; and notwithstanding the dicta of such writers as 
McCulloch, who assert that rent would not arise were 
there an unbounded extent of equally good land, in* 
creases it without reference to the natural qualities of 
land, for the increased powers of co-operation and ex- 
change which come with increased population are 
equivalent to — nay, I think we can say without meta- 
phor, that they give — an increased capacity to land. 

I do not mean to say merely that, like an improvement 
in the methods or tools of production, the increased 
power which comes with increased population gives to 
the same labor an increased result, which is equivalent 



Chap. II. INCREASE OF POPULATION. 233 

to an increase in the natural powers of land; but that 
it brings out a superior power in labor, which is localized 
on land — which attaches not to labor generally, but only 
to labor exerted on particular land; and which thus in- 
heres in the land as much as any qualities of soil, climate, 
mineral deposit, or natural situation, and passes, as they 
do, with the possession of the land. 

An improvement in the method of cultivation which, 
with the same outlay, will give two crops a year in place 
of one, or an improvement in tools and machinery which 
will double the result of labor, will manifestly, on a par- 
ticular piece of ground, have the same effect on the prod- 
uce as a doubling of the fertility of the land. But the 
difference is in this respect — the improvement in method 
or in tools can be utilized on any land; but the improve- 
ment in fertility can be utilized only on the particular 
land to which it applies. Now, in large part, the in- 
creased productiveness of labor which arises from in- 
creased population can be utilized only on particular 
land, and on particular land in greatly varying degrees. 

Here, let us imagine, is an unbounded savannah, 
stretching off in unbroken sameness of grass and flower, 
tree and rill, till the traveler tires of the monotony. 
Along comes the wagon of the first immigrant. Where 
to settle he cannot tell — every acre seems as good as 
every other acre. As to wood, as to water, as to fertil- 
ity, as to situation, there is absolutely no choice, and he 
is perplexed by the embarrassment of richness. Tired 
out with the search ror one place that is better than 
another, he stops — somewhere, anywhere — and starts to 
make himself a home. The soil is virgin and rich, game 
is abundant, the streams flash with the finest trout. 
Nature is at her very best. He has what, were he in a 
populous district, would make him rich; but he is very 
poor. To say nothing of the mental craving, which 
would lead him to welcome the sorriest stranger, he 



234 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV, 

labors under all the material disadvantages of solitude. 
He can get no temporary assistance for any work that 
requires a greater union of strength than that afforded 
by his own family, or by such help as he can permanently 
keep. Though he has cattle, he cannot often have fresh 
meat, for to get a beefsteak he must kill a bullock. He 
must be his own blacksmith, wagonmaker, carpenter, and 
cobbler— in short, a "jack of all trades and master of 
none." He cannot have his children schooled, for, to 
do so, he must himself pay and maintain a teacher c 
Such things as he cannot produce himself, he must buy 
in quantities and keep on hand, or else go without, for 
he cannot be constantly leaving his work and making a 
long journey to the verge of civilization; and when 
forced to do so, the getting of a vial of medicine or the 
replacement of a broken auger may cost him the labor of 
himself and horses for days. Under such circumstances, 
though nature is prolific, the man is poor. It is an easy 
matter for him to get enough to eat; but beyond this, 
his labor will suffice to satisfy only the simplest wants in 
the rudest way. 

Soon there comes another immigrant. Although 
every quarter section of the boundless plain is as good 
as every other quarter section, he is not beset by any 
embarrassment as to where to settle. Though the land 
is the same, there is one place that is clearly better for 
him than any other place, and that is where there is 
already a settler' and he may have a neighbor. He set- 
tles by the side of the first comer, whose condition is at 
once greatly improved, and to whom many things are 
now possible that were before impossible, for two men 
may help each other to do things that one man could 
never do. 

Another immigrant comes, and, guided by the same 
attraction, settles where there are already two. Another, 
and another, until around our first comer there are d 



Chap. II. INCREASE OF POPULATION. 235 

score of neighbors. Labor has now an effectiveness 
which, in the solitary state, it could not approach. If 
heavy work is to be done, the settlers have a log-rolling, 
and together accomplish in a day what singly would re- 
quire years. When one kills a bullock, the others take 
part of it, returning when they kill, and thus they have 
fresh meat all the time. Together they hire a school- 
master, and the children of each are taught for a frac- 
tional part of what similar teaching would have cost the 
first settler. It becomes a comparatively easy matter to 
send to the nearest town, for some one is always going. 
But there is less need for such journeys. A blacksmith 
and a wheelwright soon set up shops, and our settler can 
have his tools repaired for a small part of the labor it 
formerly cost him. A store is opened and he can get 
what he wants as he wants it; a post-office, soon added, 
gives him regular communication with the rest of the 
world. Then come a cobbler, a carpenter, a harness- 
maker, a doctor; and a little church soon arises. Satis- 
factions become possible that in the solitary state were 
impossible. There are gratifications for the social and 
the intellectual nature — for that part of the man that 
rises above the animal. The power of sympathy, the 
sense of companionship, the emulation of comparison and 
contrast, open a wider, and fuller, and more varied life. 
In rejoicing, there are others to rejoice; in sorrow, the 
mourners do not mourn alone. There are husking bees, 
and apple parings, and quilting parties. Though the 
ballroom be unplastered and the orchestra but a fiddle, 
the notes of the magician are yet in the strain, and 
Cupid dances with the dancers. At the wedding, there 
are others to admire and enjoy; in the house of death, 
there are watchers; by the open grave, stands human 
sympathy to sustain the mourners. Occasionally, comes 
a straggling lecturer to open up glimpses of the world 
of science 5 of literature, or of art; in election times, 



236 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

come stump speakers, and the citizen rises to a sense of 
dignity and power, as the cause of empires is tried before 
him in the struggle of John Doe and Eichard Eoe for his 
support and vote. And, by and by, comes the circus, 
talked of months before, and opening to children whose 
horizon has been the prairie, all the realms of the imag- 
ination — princes and princesses of fairy tale, mail-clad 
crusaders and turbaned Moors, Cinderella's fairy coach, 
and the giants of nursery lore; lions such as crouched 
before Daniel, or in circling Eoman amphitheater tore 
the saints of God; ostriches who recall the sandy deserts; 
camels such as stood around when the wicked brethren 
raised Joseph from the well and sold him into bondage; 
elephants such as crossed the Alps with Hannibal, or felt 
the sword of the Maccabees; and glorious music that 
thrills and builds in the chambers of the mind as rose 
the sunny dome of Kubla Khan. 

Go to our settler now, and say to him: "You have so 
many fruit trees which you planted; so much fencing, 
such a well, a barn, a house — in short, you have by your 
labor added so much value to this farm. Your land 
itself is not quite so good. You have been cropping it, 
and by and by it will need manure. I will give you the 
full value of all your improvements if you will give it to 
me, and go again with your family beyond the verge of 
settlement." He would laugh at you. His land yields 
no more wheat or potatoes than before, but it does yield 
far more of all the necessaries and comforts of life. His 
labor upon it will bring no heavier crops, and, we will 
suppose, no more valuable crops, but it will bring far 
more of all the other things for which men work. The 
presence of other settlers — the increase of population — 
has added to the productiveness, in these things, of labor 
bestowed upon it, and this added productiveness gives it 
a superiority over land of equal natural quality where 
there are as yet no settlers. If no land remains to be 



Chap. II. INCREASE OE POPULATION, 23? 

taken up, except such as is as far removed from popula- 
tion as was our settler's land when he first went upon it, 
the value or rent of this land will be measured by the 
whole of this added capability. If, however, as we have 
supposed, there is a continuous stretch of equal land, over 
which population is now spreading, it will not be neces- 
sary for the new settler to go into the wilderness, as did 
the first. He will settle just beyond the other settlers, 
and will get the advantage of proximity to them. The 
value or rent of our settler's land will thus depend on the 
advantage which it has, from being at the center of 
population, over that on the verge. In the one case, the 
margin of production will remain as before; in the other, 
the margin of production will be raised. 

Population still continues to increase, and as it in- 
creases so do the economies which its increase permits, 
and which in effect add to the productiveness of the land. 
Our first settler's land, being the center of population, 
the store, the blacksmith's forge, the wheelwright's shop, 
are set up on it, or on its margin, where soon arises a 
village, which rapidly grows into a town, the center of 
exchanges for the people of the whole district. With no 
greater agricultural productiveness than it had at first, 
this land now begins to develop a productiveness of a 
higher kind. To labor expended in raising corn, or 
wheat, or potatoes, it will yield no more of those things 
than at first; but to labor expended in the subdivided 
branches of production which require proximity to other 
producers, and, especially, to labor expended in that 
final part of production, which consists in distribution, 
it will yield much larger returns. The wheat-grower 
may go further on, and find land on which his labor will 
produce as much wheat, and nearly as much wealth; but 
the artisan, the manufacturer, the storekeeper, the pro- 
fessional man, find that their labor expended here, at the 
center of exchanges, will yield them much more thar i* 



238 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IK 

expended even at a little distance away from it; and this 
excess of productiveness for such purposes the land- 
owner can claim just as he could an excess in its wheat- 
producing power. And so our settler is able to sell in 
building lots a few of his acres for prices which it would 
not bring for wheat-growing if its fertility had been mul- 
tiplied many times. With the proceeds, he builds him- 
self a fine house, and furnishes it handsomely. That is 
to say, to reduce the transaction to its lowest terms, the 
people who wish to use the land build and furnish the 
house for him, on condition that he will let them avail 
themselves of the superior productiveness which the in- 
crease of population has given the land. 

Population still keeps on increasing, giving greater 
and greater utility to the land, and more and more wealth 
to its owner. The town has grown into a city — a St. 
Louis, a Chicago or a San Francisco — and still it grows. 
Production is here carried on upon a great scale, with 
the best machinery and the most favorable facilities; the 
division of labor becomes extremely minute, wonderfully 
multiplying efficiency; exchanges are of such volume and 
rapidity that they are made with the minimum of friction 
and loss. Here is the heart, the brain, of the vast social 
organism that has grown up from the germ of the first 
settlement; here has developed one of the great gan- 
glions of the human world. Hither run all roads, hither 
set all currents, through all the vast regions round 
about. Here, if you have anything to sell, is the 
market; here, if you have anything to buy, is the largest 
and the choicest stock. Here intellectual activity is 
gathered into a focus, and here springs that stimulus 
which is born of the collision of mind with mind. Here 
are the great libraries, the storehouses and granaries of 
knowledge, the learned professors, the famous special- 
ists. Here are museums and art galleries, collections of 
philosophical apparatus, and all things rare, and valuable, 



Chap. II. INCREASE OF POPULATION. 239 

and best of their kind. Here come great actors, and 
orators, and singers, from all over the world. Here, in 
short, is a center of human life, in all its varied mani- 
festations. 

So enormous are the advantages which this land now 
offers for the application of labor that instead of one 
man with a span of horses scratching over acres, you may 
count in places thousands of workers to the acre, work- 
ing tier on tier, on floors raised one above the other, five, 
six, seven. and eight stories from the ground, while un- 
derneath the surface of the earth engines are throbbing 
with pulsations that exert the force of thousands of 
horses. 

All these^ advantages attach to the land; it is on this 
land and no other that they can be utilized, for here is 
the center of population — the focus of exchanges, the 
market place and workshop of the highest forms of in- 
dustry. The productive powers which density of popu- 
lation has attached to this land are equivalent to the 
multiplication of its original fertility by the hundred fold 
and the thousand fold. And rent, which measures the 
difference between this added productiveness and that of 
the least productive land in use, has increased accord- 
ingly. Our settler, or whoever has succeeded to his 
right to the land, is now a millionaire. Like another 
Eip Van Winkle, he may have lain down and slept; still 
he is rich — not from anything he has done, but from the 
increase of population. There are lots from which for 
every foot of frontage the owner may draw more than an 
average mechanic can earn; there are lots that will sell 
for more than would suffice to pave them with gold coin. 
In the principal streets are towering buildings, of 
granite, marble, iron, and plate glass, finished in the 
most expensive style, replete with every convenience. 
Yet they are not worth as much as the land upon which 
they rest — the same land, in nothing changed, which 
when our first settler came uj)on it had no value at all. 



240 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

That this is the way in which the increase of popula- 
tion powerfully acts in increasing rent, whoever, in a 
progressive country, will look around him, may see for 
himself. The process is going on under his eyes. The 
increasing difference in the productiveness of the land in 
use, which causes an increasing rise in rent, results not 
so much from the necessities of increased population 
compelling the resort to inferior land, as from the in- 
creased productiveness which increased population gives 
to the lands already in use. The most valuable lands on 
the globe, the lands which yield the highest rent, are not 
lands of surpassing natural fertility, but lands to which 
a surpassing utility has been given by the increase of 
population. 

The increase of productiveness or utility which in- 
crease of population gives to certain lands, in the way to 
which I have been calling attention, attaches, as it were, 
to the mere quality of extension. The valuable quality 
of land that has become a center of population is its 
superficial capacity — it makes no difference whether it is 
fertile, alluvial soil like that of Philadelphia; rich bottom 
land like that of New Orleans; a filled-in marsh like that 
of St. Petersburg, or a sandy waste like the greater part 
of San Francisco. 

And where value seems to arise from superior natural 
qualities, such as deep water and good anchorage, rich 
deposits of coal and iron, or heavy timber, observation 
also shows that these superior qualities are brought out, 
rendered tangible, by population. The coal and iron 
fields of Pennsylvania, that to-day are worth enormous 
sums, were fifty years ago valueless. What is the efficient 
cause of the difference? Simply the difference in popu- 
lation. The coal and iron beds of Wyoming and Mon- 
tana, which to-day are valueless, will, in fifty years from 
now, be worth millions on millions, simply because, in 
the meantime, population will have greatly increased. 



Chap.n. INCREASE OF POPULATION. 241 

It is a well provisioned ship, this on which we sail 
through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem 
to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new 
supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very 
great command over the services of others comes to 
those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to 
say, "This is mine!" 

To recapitulate: The effect of increasing population 
upon the distribution of wealth is to increase rent, and 
consequently to diminish the proportion of the produce 
which goes to capital and labor, in two ways: First, By 
lowering the margin of cultivation. Second, By bring- 
ing out in land special capabilities otherwise latent, and 
by attaching special capabilities to particular lands. 

I am disposed to think that the latter mode, to which 
little attention has been given by political economists, is 
really the more important. But this, in our inquiry, is 
not a matter of moment. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE EFFECT OF IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS UPOX THE 
DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 

Eliminating improvements in the arts, we have seen 
the effects of increase of population upon the distribution 
of wealth. Eliminating increase of population, let us 
now see what effect improvements in the arts of produc- 
tion have upon distribution. 

We have seen that increase of population increases 
rent, rather by increasing the productiveness of labor 
than by decreasing it. If it can now be shown that, irre- 
spective of the increase of population, the effect of im* 
provements in methods of production and exchange is to 
increase rent, the disproof of the Malthusian theory — 
and of all the doctrines derived from or related to it — 
will be final and complete, for we shall have accounted 
for the tendency of material progress to lower wages and 
depress the condition of the lowest class, without re- 
course to the theory of increasing pressure against the 
means of subsistence e 

That this is the case will, I think, appear on the 
slightest consideration. 

The effect of inventions and improvements in the pro- 
ductive arts is to save labor — that is, to enable the same 
result to be secured with less labor, or a greater result 
with the same labor. 

Now, in a state of society in which the existing power 
of labor served to satisfy all material desires, and there 
was no possibility of new desires being called forth by 
the opportunity of gratifying them, the effect of labor- 



Chap. III. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS. 243 

saving improvements would be simply to reduce the 
amount of labor expended. But such a state of society, 
if it can anywhere be found, which I do not believe, 
exists only where the human most nearly approaches 
the animal. In the state of society called civilized, and 
which in this inquiry we are concerned with, the very 
reverse is the case. Demand is not a fixed quantity, 
that increases only as population increases. In each in- 
dividual it rises with his power of getting the things de- 
manded. Man is not an ox, who, when he has eaten his 
fill, lies down to chew the cud; he is the daughter of the 
horse leech, who constantly asks for more. "When I get 
some money," said Erasmus, "I will buy me some Greek 
books and afterward some clothes." The amount of 
wealth produced is nowhere commensurate with the 
desire for wealth, and desire mounts with every addi- 
tional opportunity for gratification. 

This being the case, the effect of labor-saving improve- 
ments will be to increase the production of wealth. Now, 
for the production of wealth, two things are required — 
labor and land. Therefore, the effect of labor-saving 
improvements will be to extend the demand for land, 
and wherever the limit of the quality of land in use is 
reached, to bring into cultivation lands of less natural 
productiveness, or to extend cultivation on the same 
lands to a point of lower natural productiveness. And 
thus, while the primary effect of labor-saving improve- 
ments is to increase the power of labor, the secondary 
effect is to extend cultivation, and, where this lowers the 
margin of cultivation, to increase rent. Thus, where 
land is entirely appropriated, as in England, or where it 
is either appropriated or is capable of appropriation as 
rapi^Jy as it is needed for use, as in the United States, 
the ""H-imate effect of labor-saving machinery or improve- 
ments is to increase rent without increasing wages or 
interest. 



244 , EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

It is important that this be fully understood, for it 
shows that effects attributed by current theories to in- 
crease of population are really due to the progress of in- 
vention, and explains the otherwise perplexing fact that 
labor-saving machinery everywhere fails to benefit 
laborers. 

Yet, to grasp fully this truth, it is necessary to keep 
in mind what I have already more than once adverted to 
— the interchangeability of wealth. I refer to this again, 
only because it is so persistently forgotten or ignored by 
writers who speak of agricultural production as though it 
were to be distinguished from production in general, and 
of food or subsistence as though it were not included in 
the term wealth. 

Let me ask the reader to bear in mind, what has 
already been sufficiently illustrated, that the possession or 
production of any form of wealth is virtually the posses- 
sion or production of any other form of wealth for which 
it will exchange — in order that he may clearly see that it 
is not merely improvements which effect a saving in 
labor directly applied to land that tend to increase rent, 
but all improvements that in any way save labor. 

That the labor of any individual is applied exclusively 
to the production of one form of wealth is solely the 
result of the division of labor. The object of labor on 
the part of any individual is not the obtainment of 
wealth in one particular form, but the obtainment of 
wealth in all the forms that consort with his desires. 
And, hence, an improvement which effects a saving in 
the labor required to produce one of the things desired, 
is, in effect, an increase in the power of producing all 
the other things. If it take half a man's labor to keep 
hirr in food, and the other half to provide him clothing 
and shelter, an improvement which would increase his 
power of producing food would also increase his power 
of providing clothing and shelter. If his desires for 



Chap. HI. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS. 245 

more or better food, and for more or better clothing and 
shelter, were equal, an improvement in one department 
of labor would be precisely equivalent to a like improve- 
ment in the other. If the improvement consisted in a 
doubling of the power of his labor in producing food, 
he would give one-third less labor to the production of 
food, and one-third more to the providing of clothing 
and shelter. If the improvement doubled his power to 
provide clothing and shelter he would give one-third less 
labor to the production of these things, and one-third 
more to the production of food. In either case, the 
result would be the same — he would be enabled with the 
same labor to get one-third more in quantity or quality 
of all the things he desired. 

And, so, where production is carried on by the division 
of labor between individuals, an increase in the power of 
producing one of the things sought by production in the 
aggregate adds to the power of obtaining others, and 
will increase the production of the others, to an extent 
determined by the proportion which the saving of labor 
bears to the total amount of labor expended, and by the 
relative strength of desires. I am unable to think of any 
form of wealth, the demand for which would not be in- 
creased by a saving in the labor required to produce the 
others. Hearses and coffins have been selected as exam- 
ples of things for which the demand is little likely to 
increase; but this is true only as to quantity. That in- 
creased power of supply would lead to a demand for 
more expensive hearses and coffins, no one can doubt 
who has noticed how strong is the desire to show regard 
for the dead by costly funerals. 

Nor is the demand for food limited, as in economic 
reasoning is frequently, but erroneously, assumed. Sub- 
sistence is often spoken of as though it were a fixed 
quantity; but it is fixed only as having a definite 
minimum. Less than a certain amount will not keep a 



246 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV 

human being alive, and less than a somewhat larger 
amount will not keep a human being in good health. 
But, above this minimum, the subsistence which a 
human being can use may be increased almost indefi- 
nitely. Adam Smith says, and Eicardo indorses the 
statement, that the desire for food is limited in every 
man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but 
this, manifestly, is true only in the sense that when a 
man's belly is filled, hunger is satisfied. His demands 
for food have no such limit. The stomach of a Louis 
XIV., a Louis XV., or a Louis XVI. , could not hold or 
digest more than the stomach of a French peasant of 
equal stature, yet, while a few rods of ground would 
supply the black bread and herbs which constituted the 
subsistence of the peasant, it took hundreds of thousands 
of acres to supply the demands of the king, who, besides 
his own wasteful use of the finest qualities of food, re- 
quired immense supplies for his servants, horses and 
dogs. And in the common facts of daily life, in the un- 
satisfied, though perhaps latent, desires which each one 
has, we may see how every increase in the power of pro- 
ducing any form of wealth must result in an increased 
demand for land and the direct products of land. The 
man who now uses coarse food, and lives in a small house, 
will, as a rule, if his income be increased, use more costly 
food, and move to a larger house. If he grows richer 
and richer he will procure horses, servants, gardens and 
lawns, his demand for the use of land constantly increas- 
ing with his wealth. In the city where I write, is a man 
- — but the type of men everywhere to be found — who 
used to boil his own beans and fry his own bacon, but 
who, now that he has got rich, maintains a town house 
that takes up a whole block and would answer for a first- 
class hotel, two or three country houses with extensive 
grounds, a large stud of racers, a breeding farm, private 
track, etc. It certainly takes at least a thousand 



Chap. III. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS. 247 

times, it may be several thousand times, as much land 
to supply the demands of this man now as it did when 
he was poor. 

And, so, every improvement or invention, no matter 
what it be, which gives to labor the power of producing 
more wealth, causes an increased demand for land and 
its direct products, and thus tends to force down the 
margin of cultivation, just as would the demand caused 
by an increased population. This being the case, every 
labor-saving invention, whether it be a steam plow, a 
telegraph, an improved process of smelting ores, a per- 
fecting printing press, or a sewing machine, has a tend- 
ency to increase rent. 

Or to state this truth concisely: 

Wealth in all its forms being the product of 'labor applied 
to land or the products of land, any increase in the power 
of labor, the demand for wealth being unsatisfied, will be 
utilized in procuring more wealth, and thus increase the 
demand for land. 

To illustrate this effect of labor-saving machinery and 
improvements, let us suppose a country where, as in all 
the countries of the civilized world, the land is in the 
possession of but a portion of the people. Let us sup- 
pose a permanent barrier fixed to further increase of 
population, either by the enactment and strict enforce- 
ment of an Herodian law, or from such a change in 
manners and morals as might result from an extensive 
circulation of Annie Besant's pamphlets. Let the mar- 
gin of cultivation, or production, be represented by 20. 
Thus land or other natural opportunities which, from 
the application of labor and capital, will yield a return 
of 20, will just give the ordinary rate of wages and in- 
terest, without yielding any rent; while all lands yielding 
to equal applications of labor and capital more than 20 



248 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

will yield the excess as rent. Population remaining 
fixed, let there be made inventions and improvements 
which will reduce by one-tenth the expenditure of labor 
and capital necessary to produce the same amount of 
wealth. Now, either one-tenth of the labor and capital 
may be freed, and production remain the same as before; 
or the same amount of labor and capital may be em- 
ployed, and production be correspondingly increased. 
But the industrial organization, as in all civilized coun- 
tries, is such that labor and capital, and especially labor, 
must press for employment on any terms — the industrial 
organization is such that mere laborers are not in a posi- 
tion to demand their fair share in the new adjustment, 
and that any reduction in the application of labor to pro- 
duction will, at first, at least, take the form, not of giving 
each laborer the same amount of produce for less work, 
but of throwing some of the laborers out of work and 
giving them none of the produce. Now, owing to the 
increased efficiency of labor secured by the new improve- 
ments, as great a return can be secured at the point of 
natural productiveness represented by 18, as before at 20. 
Thus, the unsatisfied desire for wealth, the competition 
of labor and capital for employment, would insure the 
extension of the margin of production, we will say to 18, 
and thus rent would be increased by the difference be- 
tween 18 and 20, while wages and interest, in quantity, 
would be no more than before, and, in proportion to the 
whole produce, would be less. There would be a 
greater production of wealth, but land owners would get 
the whole benefit, subject to temporary deductions, 
which will be hereafter stated. 

If invention and improvement still go on, the efficiency 
of labor will be still further increased, and the amount 
of labor and capital necessary to produce a given result 
further diminished. The same causes will lead to the 
utilization of this new gain in productive power for tho 



Chap. III. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTSc 249 

production of more wealth; the margin of cultivation 
will be again extended^ and rent will increase, both in 
proportion and amount, without any increase in wages 
and interest. And, so, as invention and improvement 
go on, constantly adding to the efficiency of labor, the 
margin of production will be pushed lower and lower, 
and rent constantly increased, though population should 
remain stationary. 

I do not mean to say that the lowering of the margin 
of production would always exactly correspond with the 
increase in productive power, any more than I mean to 
say that the process would be one of clearly defined 
steps. Whether, in any particular case, the lowering of 
the margin of production lags behind or exceeds the in- 
crease in productive power, will depend, I conceive, upon 
what may be called the area of productiveness that can 
be utilized before cultivation is forced to the next lowest 
point. For instance, if the margin of cultivation be at 
20, improvements which enable the same produce to be 
obtained with one-tenth less capital and labor will not 
carry the margin to 18, if the area having a produc- 
tiveness of 19 is sufficient to employ all the labor and 
capital displaced from the cultivation of the superior 
lands. In this case, the margin of cultivation would 
rest at 19, and rents would be increased by the dif- 
ference between 19 and 20, and wages and interest by 
the difference between 18 and 19. But if, with the same 
increase in productive power the area of productiveness 
between 20 and 18 should not be sufficient to employ all 
the displaced labor and capital, the margin of cultivation 
must, if the same amount of labor and capital press for 
employment, be carried lower than 18. In this case, 
rent would gain more than the increase in the product, 
and wages and interest would be less than before the im- 
provements which increased productive power Q 

Nor is it precisely true that the labor set free by eact 



250 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESSo Book IV 

improvement will all be driven to seek employment in 
the production of more wealth. The increased power of 
satisfaction, which each fresh improvement gives to a 
certain portion of the community, will be utilized in de- 
manding leisure or services, as well as in demanding 
wealth. Some laborers will, therefore, become idlers 
and some will pass from the ranks of productive to those 
of unproductive laborers — the proportion of which, as 
observation shows, tends to increase with the progress of 
society 

But, as I shall presently refer to a cause, as yet uncon- 
sidered, which constantly tends to lower the margin of 
cultivation, to steady the advance of rent, and even carry 
it beyond the proportion that would be fixed by the 
actual margin of cultivation, it is not worth while to 
take into account these perturbations in the downward 
movement of the margin of cultivation and the upward 
movement of rent. All I wish to make clear is that, 
without any increase in population, the progress of in- 
vention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of 
the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and 
smaller proportion to labor and capital. 

And, as we can assign no limits to the progress of in- 
vention, neither can we assign any limits to the increase 
of rent, short of the whole produce. For, if labor-saving 
inventions went on until perfection was attained, and 
the necessity of labor in the production of wealth was 
entirely done away with, then everything that the earth 
could yield could be obtained without labor, and the 
margin of cultivation would be extended to zero. Wages 
would be nothing, and interest would be nothing, while 
rent would take everything. For the owners of the 
land, being enabled without labor to obtain all the wealth 
that could be procured from nature, there would be no 
use for either labor or capital, and no possible way in 
which either could compel any share of the wealth pro* 



Chap. III. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ARTS. 251 

duced. And no matter how small population might be, 
if anybody but the land owners continued to exist, it 
would be at the whim or by the mercy of the land owners 
— they would be maintained either for the amusement 
of the land owners, or, as paupers, by their bounty. 

This point, of the absolute perfection of labor-saving 
inventions, may seem very remote, if not impossible of 
attainment; but it is a point toward which the march of 
invention is every day more strongly tending. And in 
the thinning out of population in the agricultural dis- 
tricts of Great Britain, where small farms are being con- 
verted into larger ones, and in the great machine-worked 
wheat-fields of California and Dakota, where one may 
ride for miles and miles through waving grain without 
seeing a human habitation, there are already suggestions 
of the final goal toward which the whole civilized world 
is hastening. The steam plow and the reaping machine 
are creating in the modern world latifundia of the same 
kind that the influx of slaves from foreign wars created 
in ancient Italy. And to many a poor fellow as he is 
shoved out of his accustomed place and forced to move 
on — as the Koman farmers were forced to join the pro- 
letariat of the great city, or sell their blood for bread in 
the ranks of the legions — it seems as though these labor- 
saving inventions were in themselves a curse, and we 
hear men talking of work, as though the wearying strain 
of the muscles were, in itself, a thing to be desired. 

In what has preceded, I have, of course, spoken of in- 
ventions and improvements when generally diffused. It 
is hardly necessary to say that as long as an invention or 
an improvement is used by so few that they derive a 
special advantage from it, it does not, to the extent of 
this special advantage, affect the general distribution of 
wealth. So, in regard to the limited monopolies created 
by patent laws, or by the causes which give the same 
character to railroad and telegraph lines, etc. Although 



252 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

generally mistaken for profits of capital, the special prof- 
its thus arising are really the returns of monopoly, as has 
been explained in a previous chapter, and, to the extent 
that they subtract from the benefits of an improvement, 
do not primarily affect general distribution. For in- 
stance, the benefits of a railroad or similar improvement 
in cheapening transportation are diffused or monopolized, 
as its charges are reduced to a rate which will yield ordi- 
nary interest on the capital invested, or kept up to a 
point which will yield an extraordinary return, or cover 
the stealing of the constructors or directors. And, as is 
well known, the rise in rent or land values corresponds 
with the reduction in the charges. 

As has before been said, in the improvements which 
advance rent, are not only to be included the improve- 
ments which directly increase productive power, but also 
such improvements in government, manners, and morals 
as indirectly increase it. Considered as material forces, 
the effect of all these is to increase productive power, 
and, like improvements in the productive arts, their 
benefit is ultimately monopolized by the possessors of 
the land. A notable instance of this is to be found in 
the abolition of protection by England. Free trade has 
enormously increased the wealth of Great Britain, with- 
out lessening pauperism. It has simply increased rent. 
And if the corrupt governments of our great American 
cities were to be made models of purity and economy, the 
effect would simply be to increase the value of land, not 
60 raise either wages or interest. 



CHAPTER IV. 

EFFECT OF THE EXPECTATION KAISED BY MATERIAL 

PROGRESS. 

We have now seen that while advancing population 
tends to advance rent, so all the causes that in a pro- 
gressive state of society operate to increase the produc- 
tive power of labor tend, also, to advance rent, and not 
to advance wages or interest. The increased production 
of wealth goes ultimately to the owners of land in in- 
creased rent; and, although, as improvement goes on, 
advantages may accrue to individuals not land holders, 
which concentrate in their hands considerable portions of 
the increased produce, yet there is in all this improve- 
ment nothing which tends to increase the general return 
either to labor or to capital. 

But there is a cause, not yet adverted to, which must 
be taken into consideration fully to explain the influence 
of material progress upon the distribution of wealth. 

That cause is the confident expectation of the future 
enhancement of land values, which arises in all progress* 
ive countries from the steady increase of rent, and which 
leads to speculation, or the holding of land for a higher 
price than it would then otherwise bring. 

We have hitherto assumed, as is generally assumed in 
elucidations of the theory of rent, that the actual margin 
of cultivation always coincides with what may be termed 
the necessary margin of cultivation — that is to say, we 
have assumed that cultivation extends to less productive 
points only as it becomes necessary from the fact that 
natural opportunities are at the more productive points 
lully utilized. 



254 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IV. 

This, probably, is the case in stationary or very slowly 
progressing communities, but in rapidly progressing 
communities, where the swift and steady increase of rent 
gives confidence to calculations of further increase, it is 
not the case. In such communities, the confident ex- 
pectation of increased prices produces, to a greater or 
less extent, the effects of a combination among land 
holders, and tends to the withholding of land from use, 
in expectation of higher prices, thus forcing the margin 
of cultivation farther than required by the necessities of 
production. 

This cause must operate to some extent in all progress- 
ive communities, though in such countries as England, 
where the tenant system prevails in agriculture, it may 
be shown more in the selling price of land than in the 
agricultural margin of cultivation, or actual rent. But 
in communities like the United States, where the user of 
land generally prefers, if he can, to own it, and where 
there is a great extent of land to overrun, it operates 
with enormous power. 

The immense area over which the population of the 
United States is scattered shows this. The man who 
sets out from the Eastern seaboard in search of the mar- 
gin of cultivation, where he may obtain land without 
paying rent, must, like the man who swam the river to 
get a drink, pass for long distances through half-tilled 
farms, and traverse vast areas of virgin soil, before he 
reaches the point where land can be had free of rent — 
i.e., by homestead entry or pre-emption. He (and, with 
him, the margin of cultivation) is forced so much farther 
than he otherwise need have gone, by the speculation 
which is holding these unused lands in expectation of in- 
creased value in the future. And when he settles, he 
will, in his turn, take up, if he can, more land than he 
can use, in the belief that it will soon become valuable; 
and so those who follow him are again forced farther on 



Chap. IV. EXPECTATION RAISED. 255 

than the necessities of production require, carrying the 
margin of cultivation to still less productive, because still 
more remote points. 

The same thing may be seen in every rapidly growing 
city. If the land of superior quality as to location were 
always fully used before land of inferior quality were 
resorted to, no vacant lots would be left as a city ex- 
tended, nor would we find miserable shanties in the midst 
of costly buildings. These lots, some of them extremely 
valuable, are withheld from use, or from the full use to 
which they might be put, because their owners, not being 
able or not wishing to improve them, prefer, in expecta- 
tion of the advance of land values, to hold them for a 
higher rate than could now be obtained from those will- 
ing to improve them. And, in consequence of this land 
being withheld from use, or from the full use of which 
it is capable, the margin of the city is pushed away so 
much farther from the center. 

But when we reach the limits of the growing city — the 
actual margin of building, which corresponds to the mar- 
gin of cultivation in agriculture — we shall not find the 
land purchasable at its value for agricultural purposes, as 
it would be were rent determined simply by present re- 
quirements; but we shall find that for a long distance 
beyond the city land bears a speculative value, based 
upon the belief that it will be required in the future for 
urban purposes, and that to reach the point at which land 
can be purchased at a price not based upon urban rent, 
we must go very far beyond the actual margin of urban 
use. 

Or, to take another case of a different kind, instances 
similar to which may doubtless be found in every locality. 
There is in Marin County, within easy access of San 
Francisco, a fine belt of redwood timber. Naturally, 
this would be first used, before resorting for the supply 
of the San Francisco market to timber lands at a much 



256 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Book IP. 

greater distance. But it yet remains uncut, and lumber 
procured many miles beyond is daily hauled past it on 
the railroad, because its owner prefers to hold for the 
greater price it will bring in the future. Thus, by the 
withholding from use of this body of timber, the margin 
of production of redwood is forced so much farther up 
and down the Coast Eange. That mineral land, when 
reduced to private ownership, is frequently withheld 
from use while poorer deposits are worked, is well known, 
and in new States it is common to find individuals who 
are called "land poor" — that is, who remain poor, some- 
times almost to deprivation, because they insist on hold- 
ing land, which they themselves cannot use, at prices at 
which no one else can profitably use it. 

To recur now to the illustration we made use of in the 
preceding chapter: With the margin of cultivation 
standing at 20, an increase in the power of production 
takes place, which renders the same result obtainable 
with one-tenth less labor. For reasons before stated, 
the margin of production must now be forced down, and 
if it rests at 18, the return to labor and capital will be 
the same as before, when the margin stood at 20, 
Whether it will be forced to 18 or be forced lower depends 
upon what I have called the area of productiveness which 
intervenes between 20 and 18. But if the confident ex- 
pectation of a further increase of rents leads the land 
owners to demand 3 rent for 20 land, 2 for 19, and 1 for 
18 land, and to withhold their land from use until these 
terms are complied with, the area of productiveness may 
be so reduced that the margin of cultivation must fall to 
17 or even lower; and thus, as the result of the increase 
in the efficiency of labor, laborers would get less than 
before, while interest would be proportionately reduced, 
and rent would increase in greater ratio than the increase 
in productive power. 

Whether we formulate it as an extension of the margin 



Chap. IV. EXPECTATION* RAISED. 257 

of production, or as a carrying of the rent line beyond 
the margin of production, the influence of speculation in 
land in increasing rent is a great fact which cannot be 
ignored in any complete theory of the distribution of 
wealth in progressive countries. It is the force, evolved 
by material progress, which tends constantly to increase 
rent in a greater ratio than progress increases production, 
and thus constantly tends, as material progress goes on 
and productive power increases, to reduce wages, not 
merely relatively, but absolutely. It is this expansive 
force which, operating with great power in new coun- 
tries, brings to them, seemingly long before their time, 
the social diseases of older countries; produces "tramps" 
on virgin acres, and breeds paupers on half-tilled soil. 

In short, the general and steady advance in land values 
in a progressive community necessarily produces that ad- 
ditional tendency to advance which is seen in the case of 
commodities when any general and continuous cause oper- 
ates to increase their price. As, during the rapid de- 
preciation of currency which marked the latter days of 
the Southern Confederacy, the fact that whatever was 
bought one day could be sold for a higher price the next, 
operated to carry up the prices of commodities even 
faster than the depreciation of the currency, so does the 
steady increase of land values, which material progress 
produces, operate still further to accelerate the increase. 
We see this secondary cause operating in full force in 
those manias of land speculation which mark the growth 
of new communities; but though these are the abnormal 
and occasional manifestations, it is undeniable that the 
cause steadily operates, with greater or less intensity, in 
all progressive societies. 

The cause which limits speculation in commodities, 
the tendency of increasing price to draw forth additional 
supplies, cannot limit the speculative advance in land 
values, as land is a fixed quantity, which human agency 



258 EFFECTS OF MATERIAL PROGRESS. Boole IP. 

can neither increase nor diminish; but there is neverthe- 
less a limit to the price of land, in the minimum required 
by labor and capital as the condition of engaging in pro- 
duction. If it were possible continuously to reduce 
wages until zero were reached, it would be possible con- 
tinuously to increase rent until it swallowed up the 
whole produce. But as wages cannot be permanently 
reduced below the point at which laborers will consent 
to work and reproduce, nor interest below the point at 
which capital will be devoted to production, there is a 
limit which restrains the speculative advance of rent. 
Hence speculation cannot have the same scope to ad- 
vance rent in countries where wages and interest are 
already near the minimum, as in countries where they 
are considerably above it. Yet that there is in all pro- 
gressive countries a constant tendency in the speculative 
advance of rent to overpass the limit where production 
would cease, is, I think, shown by recurring seasons of 
industrial paralysis — a matter which will be more fully 
examined in the next book. 



BOOK V. 

THE PROBLEM SOLVED, 



CHAPTER I. — THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF RECURRING PAR 

OXYSMS OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 

CHAPTER II. — THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY AMID AD 

VANCING WEALTH. 



To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the 
fruits of it. White parasols, and elephants mad with pride are the 
flowers of a grant of land. — Sir Wm. Jones' translation of an Indian 
grant of land, found at Tanna. 



The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner; a per- 
fumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the GEil de Boeuf, hath an 
alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and call 
it rent. — Carlyle. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF RECURRING PAROXYSMS OF 
INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 

Our long inquiry is ended. We may now marshal the 
results. 

To begin with the industrial depressions, to account 
for which so many contradictory and self-contradictory 
theories are broached. 

A consideration of the manner in which the specula- 
tive advance in land values cuts down the earnings of 
labor and capital and checks production leads, I think, 
irresistibly to the conclusion that this is the main cause 
of those periodical industrial depressions to which every 
civilized country, and all civilized countries together, 
seem increasingly liable. 

I do not mean to say that there are not other proxi- 
mate causes. The growing complexity and interdepend- 
ence of the machinery of production, which makes each 
shock or stoppage propagate itself through a widening 
circle; the essential defect of currencies which contract 
when most needed, and the tremendous alternations in 
volume that occur in the simpler forms of commercial 
credit, which, to a much greater extent than currency in 
any form, constitute the medium or flux of exchanges; 
the protective tariffs which present artificial barriers to 
the interplay of productive forces, and other similar 
causes, undoubtedly bear important part in producing 
and continuing what are called hard times. But, both 
from the consideration of principles and the observation 
of phenomena, it is clear that the great initiatory cause 



262 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

is to be looked for in the speculative advance of land 
values. 

In the preceding chapter I have shown that the specu- 
lative advance in land values tends to press the margin of 
cultivation, or production, beyond its normal limit, thus 
compelling labor and capital to accept of a smaller re- 
turn, or (and this is the only way they can resist the 
tendency) to cease production. Now, it is not only 
natural that labor and capital should resist the crowding 
down of wages and interest by the speculative advance of 
rent, but they are driven to this in self-defense, inasmuch 
as there is a minimum of return below which labor can- 
not exist nor capital be maintained. Hence, from the 
fact of speculation in land, we may infer all the phe- 
nomena which mark these recurring seasons of industrial 
depression. 

Given a progressive community, in which population is 
increasing and one improvement succeeds another, and 
land must constantly increase in value. This steady in- 
crease naturally leads to speculation in which future in- 
crease is anticipated, and land values are carried beyond 
the point at which, under the existing conditions of 
production, their accustomed returns would be left to 
labor and capital. Production, therefore, begins to stop. 
Not that there is necessarily, or even probably, an abso- 
lute diminution in production; but that there is what in 
a progressive community would be equivalent to an abso- 
lute diminution of production in a stationary community 
— a failure in production to increase proportionately, 
owing to the failure of new increments of labor and 
capital to find employment at the accustomed rates. 

This stoppage of production at some points must nec- 
essarily show itself at other points of the industrial net- 
work, in a cessation of demand, which would again check 
production there, and thus the paralysis would communi- 
cate itself through all the interlacings of industry and 



Chap. 1. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 263 

commerce, producing everywhere a partial disjointing of 
production and exchange, and resulting in the phe- 
nomena that seem to show overproduction or over- 
consumption, according to the standpoint from which 
they are viewed. 

The period of depression thus ensuing would continue 
until (1) the speculative advance in rents had been lost; 
or (2) the increase in the efficiency of labor, owing to the 
growth of population and the progress of improvement, 
had enabled the normal rent line to overtake the specu- 
lative rent line; or (3) labor and capital had become 
reconciled to engaging in production for smaller returns. 
Or, most probably, all three of these causes would co- 
operate to produce a new equilibrium, at which all the 
forces of production would again engage, and a season of 
activity ensue; whereupon rent would begin to advance 
again, a speculative advance again take place, production 
again be checked, and the same round be gone over. 

In the elaborate and complicated system of production 
which is characteristic of modern civilization, where, 
moreover, there is no such thing as a distinct and inde- 
pendent industrial community, but geographically or 
politically separated communities blend and interlace 
their industrial organizations in different modes and 
varying measures, it is not to be expected that effect 
should be seen to follow cause as clearly and definitely as 
would be the case in a simpler development of industry, 
and in a community forming a complete and distinct in- 
dustrial whole; but, nevertheless, the phenomena actu- 
ally presented by these alternate seasons of activity and 
depression clearly correspond with those we have inferred 
from the speculative advance of rent. 

Deduction thus shows the actual phenomena as result- 
ing from the principle. If we reverse the process, it is 
as easy by induction to reach the principle by tracing up 
the phenomena. 



264 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

These seasons of depression are always preceded by 
seasons of activity and speculation, and on all hands the 
connection between the two is admitted — the depression 
being looked upon as the reaction from the speculation, 
as the headache of the morning is the reaction from the 
debauch of the night. But as to the manner in which 
the depression results from the speculation, there are two 
classes or schools of opinion, as the attempts made on 
both sides of the Atlantic to account for the present in- 
dustrial depression will show. 

One school says that the speculation produced the de- 
pression by causing overproduction, and point to the 
warehouses filled with goods that cannot be sold at 
remunerative prices, to mills closed or working on half 
time, to mines shut down and steamers laid up, to money 
lying idly in bank vaults, and workmen compelled to 
idleness and privation. They point to these facts as 
showing that the production has exceeded the demand 
for consumption, and they point, moreover, to the fact 
that when government during war enters the field as an 
enormous consumer, brisk times prevail, as in the United 
States during the civil war and in England during the 
Napoleonic struggle. 

The other school says that the speculation has pro- 
duced the depression by leading to overconsumption, 
and point to full warehouses, rusting steamers, closed 
mills, and idle workmen as evidences of a cessation of 
effective demand, which, they say, evidently results from 
the fact that people, made extravagant by a fictitious 
prosperity, have lived beyond their means, and are now 
obliged to retrench — that is, to consume less wealth. 
They point, moreover, to the enormous consumption of 
wealth by wars, by the building of unremunerative rail- 
roads, by loans to bankrupt governments, etc., as extrav- 
agances which, though not felt at the time, just as the 
spendthrift does not at the moment feel the impairment 



Chap.L CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 265 

of his fortune, must now be made up by a season of 
reduced consumption. 

Now, each of these theories evidently expresses one 
side or phase of a general truth, but each of them evi- 
dently fails to comprehend the full truth. As an ex- 
planation of the phenomena, each is equally and utterly 
preposterous. 

For while the great masses of men want more wealth 
than they can get, and while they are willing to give for 
it that which is the basis and raw material of wealth — 
their labor — how can there be overproduction? And 
while the machinery of production wastes and producers 
are condemned to unwilling idleness, how can there be 
overconsumption ? 

When, with the desire to consume more, there co-exist 
the ability and willingness to produce more, industrial 
and commercial paralysis cannot be charged either to 
overproduction or to overconsumption. Manifestly, 
the trouble is that production and consumption cannot 
meet and satisfy each other. 

How does this inability arise? It is evidently and by 
common consent the result of speculation. But of specu- 
lation in what? 

Certainly not of speculation in things which are the 
products of labor — in agricultural or mineral productions, 
or manufactured goods, for the effect of speculation in 
such things, as is well shown in current treatises that 
spare me the necessity of illustration, is simply to equal- 
ize supply and demand, and to steady the interplay of 
production and consumption by an action analogous to 
that of a fly-wheel in a machine. 

Therefore, if speculation be the cause of these indus- 
trial depressions, it must be speculation in things not the 
production of labor, but yet necessary to the exertion of 
labor in the production of wealth — of things of fixed 
quantity; that is to say, it must be speculation in land. 



266 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

That land speculation is the true cause of industrial 
depression is, in the United States, clearly evident. In 
each period of industrial activity land values have stead- 
ily risen, culminating in speculation which carried them 
up in great jumps. This has been invariably followed by 
a partial cessation of production, and its correlative, a 
cessation of effective demand (dull trade), generally 
accompanied by a commercial crash; and then has suc- 
ceeded a period of comparative stagnation, during which 
the equilibrium has been again slowly established, and 
the same round been run again. This relation is 
observable throughout the civilized world. Periods of 
industrial activity always culminate in a speculative 
advance of land values, followed by symptoms of checked 
production, generally shown at first by cessation of de- 
mand from the newer countries, where the advance in 
land values has been greatest. 

That this must be the main explanation of these 
periods of depression, will be seen by an analysis of the 
facts. 

All trade, let it be remembered, is the exchange of 
commodities for commodities, and hence the cessation 
of demand for some commodities, which marks the de- 
pression of trade, is really a cessation in the supply of 
other commodities. That dealers find their sales declin- 
ing and manufacturers find orders falling off, while the 
things which they have to sell, or stand ready to make, 
are things for which there is yet a widespread desire, 
simply shows that the supply of other things, which in 
the course of trade would be given for them, has de- 
clined. In common parlance we say that "buyers have 
no money, " or that "money is becoming scarce," but in 
talking in this way we ignore the fact that money is but 
the medium of exchange. What the would-be buyers 
really lack is not money, but commodities which they 
can turn into money — what is really becoming scarcer, is 



Chap. I. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 267 

produce of some sort. The diminution of the effective 
demand of consumers is therefore but a result of the 
diminution of production. 

This is seen very clearly by storekeepers in a manu- 
facturing town when the mills are shut down and opera- 
tives thrown out of work. It is the cessation of produc- 
tion which deprives the operatives of means to make the 
purchases they desire, and thus leaves the storekeeper 
with what, in view of the lessened demand, is a super- 
abundant stock, and forces him to discharge some of his 
clerks and otherwise reduce his demands. And the ces- 
sation of demand (I am speaking, of course, of general 
cases and not of any alteration in relative demand from 
such causes as change of fashion), which has left the 
manufacturer with superabundant stock and compelled 
him to discharge his hands, must arise in the same way. 
Somewhere, it may be at the other end of the world, a 
check in production has produced a check in the demand 
for consumption. That demand is lessened without want 
being satisfied, shows that production is somewhere 
checked. 

People want the things the manufacturer makes as 
much as ever, just as the operatives want the things the 
storekeeper has to sell. But they do not have as much 
to give for them. Production has somewhere been 
checked, and this reduction in the supply of some things 
has shown itself in cessation of demand for others, the 
check propagating itself through the whole framework 
of industry and exchange. Now, the industrial pyramid 
manifestly rests on the land. The primary and funda- 
mental occupations, which create a demand for all 
others, are evidently those which extract wealth from 
nature, and, hence, if we trace from one exchange point 
to another, and from one occupation to another, this 
check to production, which shows itself in decreased 
purchasing power, we must ultimately find it in some 



268 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

obstacle which checks labor in expending itself on land. 
And that obstacle, it is clear, is the speculative advance 
in rent, or the value of land, which produces the same 
effects, as in fact, it is, a lock-out of labor and capital by 
land owners. This check to production, beginning at 
the basis of interlaced industry, propagates itself from 
exchange point to exchange point, cessation of supply 
becoming failure of demand, until, so to speak, the 
whole machine is thrown out of gear, and the spectacle 
is everywhere presented of labor going to waste while 
laborers suffer from want. 

This strange and unnatural spectacle of large numbers 
of willing men who cannot find employment is enough 
to suggest the true cause to whomsoever can think con- 
secutively. For, though custom has dulled us to it, it is 
a strange and unnatural thing that men who wish to labor, 
in order to satisfy their wants, cannot find the oppor- 
tunity — as, since labor is that which produces wealth, the 
man who seeks to exchange labor for food, clothing, or 
any other form of wealth, is like one who proposes to 
give bullion for coin, or wheat for flour. We talk about 
the supply of labor and the demand for labor, but, evi- 
dently, these are only relative terms. The supply of 
labor is everywhere the same — two hands always come 
into the world with one mouth, twenty-one boys to every 
twenty girls; and the demand for labor must always 
exist as long as men want things which labor alone can 
procure. We talk about the "want of work/' but, evi- 
dently, it is not work that is short while want continues; 
evidently, the supply of labor cannot be too great, nor 
the demand for labor too small, when people suffer for 
the lack of things that labor produces. The real trouble 
must be that supply is somehow prevented from satisfy- 
ing demand, that somewhere there is an obstacle which 
prevents labor from producing the things that laborers 
want. 



Chap.l. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 269 

Take the case of any one of these vast masses of un- 
employed men, to whom, though he never heard of Mal- 
thus, it to-day seems that there are too many people in 
the world. In his own wants, in the needs of his anxious 
wife, in the demands of his half-cared-for, perhaps even 
hungry and shivering children, there is demand enough 
for labor, Heaven knows! In his own willing hands is 
the supply. Put him on a solitary island, and though cut 
off from all the enormous advantages which the co- 
operation, combination, and machinery of a civilized 
community give to the productive powers of man, yet his 
two hands can fill the mouths and keep warm the backs 
that depend upon them. Yet where productive power is 
as its highest development they cannot. Why? Is it 
not because in the one case he has access to the material 
and forces of nature, and in the other this access is 
denied? 

Is it not the fact that labor is thus shut off from 
nature which can alone explain the state of things that 
compels men to stand idle who would willingly supply 
their wants by their labor? The proximate cause of en- 
forced idleness with one set of men may be the cessation 
of demand on the part of other men for the particular 
things they produce, but trace this cause from point to 
point, from occupation to occupation, and you will find 
that enforced idleness in one trade is caused by enforced 
idleness in another, and that the paralysis which pro- 
duces dullness in all trades cannot be said to spring from 
too great a supply of labor or too small a demand for 
labor, but must proceed from the fact that supply cannot 
meet demand by producing the things which satisfy want 
and are the object of labor. 

Now, what is necessary to enable labor to produce 
these things, is land. When w r e speak of labor creating 
wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. 
The whole human race, were they to labor forever, could 



270 THE PKOBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

not create the tiniest mote that floats in a sunbeam — . 
could not make this rolling sphere one atom heavier or 
one atom lighter. In producing wealth, labor, with the 
aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms de- 
sired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, 
therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces 
— that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all 
wealth. It is the mine from which must be drawn the 
ore that labor fashions. It is the substance to which 
labor gives the form. And, hence, when labor cannot 
satisfy its wants, may we not with certainty infer that it 
can be from no other cause than that labor is denied 
access to land? 

When in all trades there is what we call scarcity 
of employment; when, everywhere, labor wastes, while 
desire is unsatisfied, must not the obstacle which pre- 
vents labor from producing the wealth it needs, lie at 
the foundation of the industrial structure? That foun- 
dation is land. Milliners, optical instrument makers, 
gilders, and polishers, are not the pioneers of new settle- 
ments. Miners did not go to California or Australia be- 
cause shoemakers, tailors, machinists, and printers were 
there. But those trades followed the miners, just as 
they are now following the gold diggers into the Black 
Hills and the diamond diggers into South Africa. It is 
not the storekeeper who is the cause of the farmer, but 
the farmer who brings the storekeeper. It is not the 
growth of the city that develops the country, but the 
development of the country that makes the city grow. 
And, hence, when, through all trades, men willing to 
work cannot find opportunity to do so, the difficulty 
must arise in the employment that creates a demand for 
all other employments — it must be because labor is shut 
out from land. 

In Leeds or Lowell, in Philadelphia or Manchester, in 
London or New York, it may require a grasp of first 



Chap, I. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 271 

principles to see this; but where industrial development 
has not become so elaborate, nor the extreme links of the 
chain so widely separated, one has but to look at obvious 
facts. Although not yet thirty years old, the city of San 
Francisco, both in population and in commercial impor- 
tance, ranks among the great cities of the world, and, 
next to New York, is the most metropolitan of American 
cities. Though not yet thirty years old, she has had for 
some years an increasing number of unemployed men. 
Clearly, here, it is because men cannot find employment 
in the country that there are so many unemployed in the 
city; for when the harvest opens they go trooping out, 
and when it is over they come trooping back to the city 
again. If these now unemployed men were producing 
wealth from the land, they would not only be employing 
themselves, but would be employing all the mechanics of 
the city, giving custom to the storekeepers, trade to the 
merchants, audiences to the theaters, and subscribers 
and advertisements to the newspapers — creating effective 
demand that would be felt in New England and Old 
England, and wherever throughout the world come the 
articles that, when they have the means to pay for them, 
such a population consumes. 

Now, why is it that this unemployed labor cannot 
employ itself upon the land? Not that the land is all in 
use. Though all the symptoms that in older countries 
are taken as showing a redundancy of population are be- 
ginning to manifest themselves in San Francisco, it is 
idle to talk of redundancy of population in a State that 
with greater natural resources than France has not yet a 
million of people. Within a few miles of San Francisco 
is unused land enough to give employment to every man 
who wants it. I do not mean to say that every unem- 
ployed man could turn farmer or build himself a house, 
if he had the land; but that enough could and would do 



272 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Booh V x 

so to give employment to the rest. What is it, then, 
that prevents labor from employing itself on this land? 
Simply, that it has been monopolized and is held at 
speculative prices, based not upon present value, but 
upon the added value that will come with the future 
growth of population. 

What may thus be seen in San Francisco by whoever is 
willing to see, may, I doubt not, be seen as clearly in 
other places. 

The present commercial and industrial depression, 
which first clearly manifested itself in the United States 
in 1872, and has spread with greater or less intensity over 
the civilized world, is largely attributed to the undue ex- 
tension of the railroad system, with which there are many 
things that seem to show its relation. I am fully conscious 
that the construction of railroads before they are actually 
needed may divert capital and labor from more to less 
productive employments, and make a community poorer 
instead of richer; and when the railroad mania was at its 
highest, I pointed this out in a political tract addressed 
to the people of California;* but to assign to this wasting 
of capital such a widespread industrial dead-lock seems 
to me like attributing an unusually low tide to the draw- 
ing of a few extra bucketfuls of water. The waste of 
capital and labor during the civil war was enormously 
greater than it could possibly be by the construction of 
unnecessary railroads, but without producing any such 
result. And, certainly, there seems to be little sense in 
talking of the waste of capital and labor in railroads as 
causing this depression, when the prominent feature of 
the depression has been the superabundance of capital 
and labor seeking employment. 

Yet, that there is a connection between the rapid con- 

*The Subsidy Question and the Democratic Party, 1871. 



Chap. I. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 273 

struction of railroads and industrial depression, any one 
who understands what increased land values mean, and 
who has noticed the effect which the construction of 
railroads has upon land speculation, can easily see. 
Wherever a railroad was built or projected, lands sprang 
up in value under the influence of speculation, and thou- 
sands of millions of dollars were added to the nominal 
values which capital and labor were asked to pay out- 
right, or to pay in installments, as the price of being 
allowed to go to work and produce wealth. The in- 
evitable result was to check production, and this check 
to production propagated itself in a cessation of demand, 
which checked production to the furthest verge of the 
wide circle of exchanges, operating with accumulated 
force in the centers of the great industrial commonwealth 
into which commerce links the civilized world. 

The primary operations of this cause can, perhaps, be 
nowhere more clearly traced than in California, which, 
from its comparative isolation, has constituted a pecul- 
iarly well-defined community. 

Until almost its close, the last decade was marked in 
California by the same industrial activity which was 
shown in the Northern States, and, in fact, throughout 
the civilized world, when the interruption of exchanges 
and the disarrangement of industry caused by the war 
and the blockade of Southern ports is considered. This 
activity could not be attributed to inflation of the cur- 
rency or to lavish expenditures of the General Govern- 
ment, to which in the Eastern States the comparative 
activity of the same period has since been attributed; 
for, in spite of legal tender laws, the Pacific Coast adhered 
to a coin currency, and the taxation of the Federal Gov- 
ernment took away very much more than was returned 
in Federal expenditures. It was attributable solely to 
normal causes, for, though placer mining was declining, 
the Nevada silver mines were being opened, wheat and 



274 r THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book P. 

wool were beginning to take the place of gold in the 
table of exports, and an increasing population and the 
improvement in the methods of production and exchange 
were steadily adding to the efficiency of labor. 

With this material progress went on a steady enhance- 
ment in land values — its consequence. This steady 
advance engendered a speculative advance, which, with 
the railroad era, ran up land values in every direction. 
If the population of California had steadily grown when 
the long, costly, fever-haunted Isthmus route was the 
principal mode of communication with the Atlantic 
States, it must, it was thought, increase enormously with 
the opening of a road which would bring New York 
harbor and San Francisco Bay within seven days' easy 
travel, and when in the State itself the locomotive took 
the place of stage coach and freight wagon. The ex- 
pected increase of land values which would thus accrue 
was discounted in advance. Lots on the outskirts of 
San Francisco rose hundreds and thousands per cent., 
and farming land was taken up and held for high prices, 
in whichever direction an immigrant was likely to go. 

But the anticipated rush of immigrants did not take 
place. Labor and capital could not pay so much for 
land and make fair returns. Production was checked, 
if not absolutely, at least relatively. As the transcon- 
tinental railroad approached completion, instead of in- 
creased activity symptoms of depression began to mani- 
fest themselves; and, when it was completed, to the 
season of activity had succeeded a period of depression 
which has not since been fully recovered from, during 
which wages and interest have steadily fallen. What I 
have called the actual rent line, or margin of cultivation, 
is thus (as well as by the steady march of improvement 
and increase of population, which, though slower than it 
otherwise would have been, still goes on) approaching 
the speculative rent line, but the tenacity with which a 



Chap. I. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 275 

speculative advance in th* price of land is maintained in 
a developing community is well known.* 

Now, what thus went on in California went on in every 
progressive section of the Union. Everywhere that a 
railroad was built or projected, land was monopolized in 
anticipation, and the benefit of the improvement was 
discounted in increased land values. The speculative 
advance in rent thus outrunning the normal advance, 
production was checked, demand was decreased, and 
labor and capital were turned back from occupations 
more directly concerned with land, to glut those in 
which the value of land is a less perceptible element. It 
is thus that the rapid extension of railroads is related to 
the succeeding depression. 

And what went on in the United States went on in a 
greater or less obvious degree all over the progressive 
world. Everywhere land values have been steadily in- 
creasing with material progress, and everywhere this 
increase begot a speculative advance. The impulse of 
the primary cause not only radiated from the newer sec- 
tions of the Union to the older sections, and from the 
United States to Europe, but everywhere the primary 
cause was acting. And, hence, a world-wide depression 
of industry and commerce, begotten of a world-wide 
material progress. 

There is one thing which, it may seem, I have over- 
looked, in attributing these industrial depressions to the 
speculative advance of rent or land values as a main and 

*It is astonishing how in a new country of great expectations 
speculative prices of land will be kept up. It is common to hear the 
expression, " There is no market for real estate; you cannot sell it at 
any price, " and yet, at the same time, if you go to buy it, unless you 
find somebody who is absolutely compelled to sell, you must pay 
the prices that prevailed when speculation ran high. For owners, 
believing that land values must ultimately advance, hold on as long 
as they can. 



276 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

primary cause. The operation of such a cause, though 
it may be rapid, must be progressive — resembling a pres- 
sure, not a blow. But these industrial depressions seem 
to come suddenly — they have, at their beginning, the 
character of a paroxysm, followed by a comparative 
lethargy, as if of exhaustion. Everything seems to be 
going on as usual, commerce and industry vigorous and 
expanding, when suddenly there comes a shock, as of a 
thunderbolt out of a clear sky — a bank breaks, a great 
manufacturer or merchant fails, and, as if a blow had 
thrilled through the entire industrial organization, fail- 
ure succeeds failure, and on every side workmen are 
discharged from employment, and capital shrinks into 
profitless security. 

Let me explain what I think to be the reason of this: 
To do so, we must take into account the manner in 
which exchanges are made, for it is by exchanges that all 
the varied forms of industry are linked together into one 
mutually related and interdependent organization. To 
enable exchanges to be made between producers far re- 
moved by space and time, large stocks must be kept in 
store and in transit, and this, as I have already explained, 
I take to be the great function of capital, in addition to 
that of supplying tools and seed. These exchanges are, 
perhaps necessarily, largely made upon credit — that is to 
say, the advance upon one side is made before the return 
is received on the other. 

Now, without stopping to inquire as to the causes, it is 
manifest that these advances are, as a rule, from the 
more highly organized and later developed industries to 
the more fundamental. The West Coast African, for 
instance, who exchanges palm oil and cocoanuts for 
gaudy calico and Birmingham idols, gets his return im- 
mediately; the English merchant, on the contrary, has 
to lay out of his goods a long while before he gets his 
returns. The farmer can sell his crop as soon as it is 



Chap.L CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 277 

harvested, and for cash; the great manufacturer must 
keep a large stock, send his goods long distances to 
agents, and, generally, sell on time. Thus, as advances 
and credits are generally from what we may call the sec- 
ondary, to what we may call the primary industries, it 
follows that any check to production which proceeds 
from the latter will not immediately manifest itself in 
the former. The system of advances and credits consti- 
tutes, as it were, an elastic connection, which w T ill give 
considerably before breaking, but which, when it breaks, 
will break with a snap. 

Or, to illustrate in another way what I mean: The great 
pyramid of Gizeh is composed of layers of masonry, the 
bottom layer, of course, supporting all the rest. Could 
we by some means gradually contract this bottom layer, 
the upper part of the pyramid would for some time 
retain its form, and then, when gravitation at length 
overcame the adhesiveness of the material, would not 
diminish gradually and regularly, but would break off 
suddenly, in large pieces. Now, the industrial organiza- 
tion may be likened to such a pyramid. "What is the 
proportion which in a given stage of social development 
the various industries bear to each other, it is difficult, 
and perhaps impossible, to say; but it is obvious that 
there is such a proportion, just as in a printer's font of 
type there is a certain proportion between the various 
letters. Each form of industry, as it is developed by 
division of labor, springs from and rises out of the others, 
and all rest ultimately upon land; for, without land, 
labor is as impotent as would be a man in void space. 
To make the illustration closer to the condition of a 
progressive country, imagine a pyramid composed of su- 
perimposed layers — the whole constantly growing and 
expanding. Imagine the growth of the layer nearest the 
ground to be checked. The others will for a time keep 
on expanding — in fact, for the moment, the tendency 



278 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

will be to quicker expansion, for the vital force which is 
refused scope on the ground layer will strive to find vent 
in those above — until, at length, there is a decided over- 
balance and a sudden crumbling along all the faces of 
the pyramid. 

That the main cause and general course of the recur- 
ring paroxysms of industrial depression, which are becom- 
ing so marked a feature of modern social life, are thus ex- 
plained, is, 1 think, clear. And let the reader remember 
that it is only the main causes and general courses of 
such phenomena that we are seeking to trace or that, in 
fact, it is possible to trace with any exactness. Political 
economy can deal, and has need to deal, only with 
general tendencies. The derivative forces are so multi- 
form, the actions and reactions are so various, that the 
exact character of the phenomena cannot be predicted. 
We know that if a tree is cut through it will fall, but 
precisely in what direction will be determined by the in- 
clination of the trunk, the spread of the branches, the 
impact of the blows, the quarter and force of the wind; 
and even a bird lighting on a twig, or a frightened 
squirrel leaping from bough to bough, will not be with- 
out its influence. We know that an insult will arouse a 
feeling of resentment in the human breast, but to say how 
far and in what way it will manifest itself, would require 
a synthesis which would build up the entire man and all 
his surroundings, past and present. 

The manner in which the sufficient cause to which I 
have traced them explains the main features of these in- 
dustrial depressions is in striking contrast with the con- 
tradictory and self-contradictory attempts which have 
been made to explain them on the current theories of the 
distribution of wealth. That a speculative advance in 
rent or land values invariably precedes each of these sea 
sons of industrial depression is everywhere clear. That 
they bear to each other the relations of cause and effect, 



Chap. I. CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION. 279 

is obvious to whomsoever considers the necessary rela- 
tions between land and labor. 

And that the present depression is running its course, 
and that, in the manner previously indicated, a new 
equilibrium is being established, which will result in 
another season of comparative activity, may already be 
seen in the United States. The normal rent line and the 
speculative rent line are being brought together: (1) By 
the fall in speculative land values, which is very evident 
in the reduction of rents and shrinkage of real estate 
values in the principal cities. (2) By the increased effi- 
ciency of labor, arising from the growth of population and 
the utilization of new inventions and discoveries, some of 
which almost as important as that of the use of steam we 
seem to be on the verge of grasping. (3) By the lower- 
ing of the habitual standard of interest and wages, which, 
as to interest, is shown by the negotiation of a govern- 
ment loan at four per cent., and as to wages is too gen- 
erally evident for any special citation. When the equi- 
librium is thus re-established, a season of renewed activ- 
ity, culminating in a speculative advance of land values 
will set in.* But wages and interest will not recover 
their lost ground. The net result of all these perturba- 
tions or wave-like movements is the gradual forcing of 
wages and interest toward their minimum. These tem- 
porary and recurring depressions exhibit, in fact, as was 
noticed in the opening chapter, but intensifications of 
the general movement which accompanies material 
progress. 

* This was written a year ago. It is now (July, 1879) evident that 
a new period of activity has commenced, as above predicted, and in 
New York and Chicago real estate prices have already begun to re- 
cover. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY AMID ADVANCING WEALTH, 

The great problem, of which these recurring seasons 
of industrial depression are but peculiar manifestations, 
is now, I think, fully solved, and the social phenomena 
which all over the civilized world appall the philanthro- 
pist and perplex the statesman, which hang with clouds 
the future of the most advanced races, and suggest 
doubts of the reality and ultimate goal of what we have 
fondly called progress, are now explained. 

The reason why, in spite of the increase of productive 
power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which ivill give 
but a bare living, is that, with increase in productive power, 
rent tends to even greater increase, thus producing a con- 
stant tendency to the forcing down of wages. 

In every direction, the direct tendency of advancing 
civilization is to increase the power of human labor to 
satisfy human desires — to extirpate poverty, and to ban- 
ish want and the fear of want. All the things in which 
progress consists, all the conditions which progressive 
communities are striving for, have for their direct and 
natural result the improvement of the material (and con- 
sequently the intellectual and moral) condition of all 
within their influence. The growth of population, the 
increase and extension of exchanges, the discoveries of 
science, the march of invention, the spread of education, 
the improvement of government, and thp amelioratior of 
manners, considered as material forces, have all a direct, 
tendency to increase the productive power of labor — not 



Chap.n. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 281 

of some labor, but of all labor; not in some departments 
of industry, but in all departments of industry; for the 
law of the production of wealth in society is the law of 
"each for all, and all for each." 

But labor cannot reap the benefits which advancing 
civilization thus brings, because they are intercepted. 
Land being necessary to labor, and being reduced to 
private ownership, every increase' in the productive power 
of labor but increases rent — the price that labor must pay 
for the opportunity to utilize its powers; and thus all 
the advantages gained by the march of progress go to the 
owners of land, and wages do not increase. Wages can- 
not increase; for the greater the earnings of labor the 
greater the price that labor must pay out of its earnings 
for the opportunity to make any earnings at all. The 
mere laborer has thus no more interest in the general 
advance of productive power than the Cuban slave has in 
advance in the price of sugar. And just as an advance 
in [the price of sugar may make the condition of the 
slave worse, by inducing the master to drive him harder, 
so may the condition of the free laborer be positively, as 
well as relatively, changed for the worse by the increase 
in the productive power of his labor. For, begotten of 
the continuous advance of rents, arises a speculative 
tendency which discounts the effect of future improve- 
ments by a still further advance of rent, and thus tends, 
where this has not occurred from the normal advance of 
rent, to drive wages down to the slave point — the point 
at which the laborer can just live. 

And thus robbed of all the benefits of the increase in 
productive power, labor is exposed to certain effects of 
advancing civilization which, without the advantages 
that naturally accompany them, are positive evils, and of 
themselves tend to reduce the free laborer to the helpless 
and degraded condition of the slave. 

For all improvements which add to productive power as 



282 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

civilization advances consist in, or necessitate, a still fur- 
ther subdivision of labor, and the efficiency of the whole 
body of laborers is increased at the expense of the inde- 
pendence of the constituents. The individual laborer 
acquires knowledge of and skill in but an infinitesimal 
part of the varied processes which are required to supply 
even the commonest wants. The aggregate produce of 
the labor of a savage tribe is small, but each member is 
capable of an independent life. He can build his own 
habitation, hew out or stitch together his own canoe, 
make his own clothing, manufacture his own weapons, 
snares, tools and ornaments. He has all the knowledge 
of nature possessed by his tribe — knows what vegetable 
productions are fit for food, and where they may be 
found; knows the habits and resorts of beasts, birds, 
fishes, and insects; can pilot himself by the sun or the 
stars, by the turning of blossoms or the mosses on the 
trees; is, in short, capable of supplying all his wants. 
He may be cut off from his fellows and still live; and 
thus possesses an independent power which makes him a 
free contracting party in his relations to the community 
of which he is a member. 

Compare with this savage the laborer in the lowest 
ranks of civilized society, whose life is spent in pro- 
ducing but one thing, or oftener but the infinitesimal 
part of one thing, out of the multiplicity of things that 
constitute the wealth of society and go to supply even 
the most primitive wants; who not only cannot make 
even the tools required for his work, but often works 
with tools that he does not own, and can never hope to 
own. Compelled to even closer and more continuous 
labor than the savage, and gaining by it no more than 
the savage gets — the mere necessaries of life — he loses 
the independence of the savage. He is not only unable 
to apply his own powers to the direct satisfaction of his 
own wants, but, without the concurrence of many others, 



Chap. II. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 283 

he is unable to apply them indirectly to the satisfaction 
of his wants. He is a mere link in an enormous chain of 
producers and consumers, helpless to separate himself, 
and helpless to move, except as they move. The worse 
his position in society, the more dependent is he on soci- 
ety; the more utterly unable does he become to do any- 
thing for himself. The very power of exerting his labor 
for the satisfaction of his wants passes from his own con- 
trol, and may be taken away or restored by the actions 
of others, or by general causes over which he has no more 
influence than he has over the motions of the solar sys- 
tem. The primeval curse comes to be looked upon as a 
boon, and men think, and talk, and clamor, and legislate 
as though monotonous manual labor in itself were a good 
and not an evil, an end and not a means. Under such 
circumstances, the man loses the essential quality of 
manhood — the godlike power of modifying and control- 
ling conditions. He becomes a slave, a machine, a com- 
modity — a thing, in some respects, lower than the 
animal. 

I am no sentimental admirer of the savage state. I do 
not get my ideas of the untutored children of nature 
from Eousseau, or Chateaubriand, or Cooper. I am con- 
scious of its material and mental poverty, and its low and 
narrow range. I believe that civilization is not only the 
natural destiny of man, but the enfranchisement, eleva- 
tion, and refinement of all his powers, and think that it 
is only in such moods as may lead him to envy the cud- 
chewing cattle, that a man who is free to the advantages 
of civilization could look with regret upon the savage 
state. But, nevertheless, I think no one who will open 
his eyes to the facts can resist the conclusion that there 
are in the heart of our civilization large classes with 
whom the veriest savage could not afford to exchange. 
It is my deliberate opinion that if, standing on the 
threshold of being, one were given the choice of entering 



284 , THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

life as a Tierra del Fuegan, a black fellow of Australia, 
an Esquimaux in the Arctic Circle, or among the lowest 
classes in such a highly civilized country as Great Brit- 
ain, he would make infinitely the better choice in select- 
ing the lot of the savage. For those classes who in the 
midst of wealth are condemned to want suffer all the 
privations of the savage, without his sense of personal 
freedom; they are condemned to more than his narrow- 
ness and littleness, without opportunity for the growth 
of his rude virtues; if their horizon is wider, it is but to 
reveal blessings that they cannot enjoy. 
1 There are some to whom this may seem like exaggera- 
tion, but it is only because they have never suffered 
themselves to realize the true condition of those classes 
upon whom the fron heel of modern civilization presses 
with full force. As De Tocqueville observes, in one of 
his letters to Mme. Swetchine, "we so soon become used 
to the thought of want that we do not feel that an evil 
which grows greater to the sufferer the longer it lasts be- 
comes less to the observer by the very fact of its dura- 
tion ;" and perhaps the best proof of the justice of this 
observation is that in cities where there exists a pauper 
class and a criminal class, where young girls shiver as 
they sew for bread, and tattered and barefooted children 
make a home in the streets, money is regularly raised to 
send missionaries to the heathen! Send missionaries to 
the heathen! it would be laughable if it were not so sad. 
Baal no longer stretches forth his hideous, sloping arms; 
but in Christian lands mothers slay their infants for a 
burial fee! And I challenge the production from any 
authentic accounts of savage life of such descriptions of 
degradation as are to be found in official documents of 
highly civilized countries — in reports of Sanitary Com- 
missioners and of inquiries into the condition of the 
laboring poor. 

The simple theory which I have outlined (if indeed it 



Chap. II. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 285 

can be called a theory which is but the recognition of the 
most obvious relations) explains this conjunction of pov- 
erty with wealth, of low wages with high productive 
power, of degradation amid enlightenment, of virtual 
slavery in political liberty. It harmonizes, as results 
flowing from a general and inexorable law, facts other- 
wise most perplexing, and exhibits the sequence and re- 
lation between phenomena that without reference to it 
are diverse and contradictory. It explains why interest 
and wages are higher in new than in older communities, 
though the average, as well as the aggregate, production 
of wealth is less. It explains why improvements which 
increase the productive power of labor and capital in- 
crease the reward of neither. It explains what is com- 
monly called the conflict between labor and capital, while 
proving the real harmony of interest between them. It 
cuts the last inch of ground from under the fallacies of 
protection, while showing why free trade fails to benefit 
permanently the working classes. It explains why want 
increases with abundance, and wealth tends to greater 
and greater aggregations. It explains the periodically 
recurring depressions of industry without recourse either 
to the absurdity of "over-production" or the absurdity 
of "over-consumption." It explains the enforced idle- 
ness of large numbers of would-be producers, which 
wastes the productive force of advanced communities, 
without the absurd assumption that there is too little 
work to do or that there are too many to do it. It ex- 
plains the ill effects upon the laboring classes which 
often follow the introduction of machinery, without 
denying the natural advantages which the use of ma- 
chinery gives. It explains the vice and misery which 
show themselves amid dense population, without at- 
tributing to the laws of the All-Wise and All-Beneficent 
defects which belong only to the short-sighted and selfish 
enactments of men. 



286 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

This explanation is in accordance with all the facts. 

Look over the world to-day. In countries the most 
widely differing — under conditions the most diverse as to 
government, as to industries, as to tariffs, as to currency 
— you will find distress among the working classes; but 
everywhere that you thus find distress and destitution in 
the midst of wealth you will find that the land is monop- 
olized; that instead of being treated as the common 
property of the whole people, it is treated as the private 
property of individuals; that, for its use by labor, large 
revenues are extorted from the earnings of labor. Look 
over the world to-day, comparing different countries with 
each other, and you will see that it is not the abundance 
of capital or the productiveness of labor that makes 
wages high or low; but the extent to which the monopo- 
lizers of land can, in rent, levy tribute upon the earnings 
of labor. Is it not a notorious fact, known to the most 
ignorant, that new countries, where the aggregate wealth 
is small, but where land is cheap, are always better coun- 
tries for the laboring classes than the rich countries, 
where land is dear? Wherever you find land relatively 
low, will you not find wages relatively high? And 
wherever land is high, will you not find wages low? As 
land increases in value, poverty deepens and pauperism 
appears. In the new settlements, where land is cheap, 
you will find no beggars, and the inequalities in condi- 
tion are very slight. In the great cities, where land is 
so valuable that it is measured by the foot, you will find 
the extremes of poverty and of luxury. And this dis- 
parity in condition between the two extremes of the social 
scale may always be measured by the price of land. 
Land in New York is more valuable than in San Fran- 
cisco; and in New York, the San Franciscan may see 
squalor and misery that will make him stand aghast. 
Land is more valuable in London than in New York; 



Chap. II. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 287 

and in London, there is squalor and destitution worse 
than that of New York. 

Compare the same country in different times, and the 
same relation is obvious. As the result of much investi- 
gation, Hallam says he is convinced that the wages of 
manual labor were greater in amount in England during 
the middle ages than they are now. Whether this is so 
or not, it is evident that they could not have been much, 
if any, less. The enormous increase in the efficiency of 
labor, which even in agriculture is estimated at seven or 
eight hundred per cent., and in many branches of indus- 
try is almost incalculable, has only added to rent. The 
rent of agricultural land in England is now, according to 
Professor Rogers, 120 times as great, measured in 
money, as it was 500 years ago, and 14 times as great, 
measured in wheat; while in the rent of building land, 
and mineral land, the advance has been enormously 
greater. According to the estimate of Professor Faw- 
cett, the capitalized rental value of the land of England 
now amounts to £4,500,000,000, or $21,870,000,000— that 
is to say, a few thousand of the people of England hold a 
lien upon the labor of the rest, the capitalized value of 
which is more than twice as great as, at the average price 
of Southern negroes in 1860 would be the value of her 
whole population were they slaves. 

In Belgium and Flanders, in France and Germany, the 
rent and selling price of agricultural land have doubled 
within the last thirty years.* In short, increased power 
of production has everywhere added to the value of land: 
nowhere has it added to the value of labor; for though 
actual wages may in some places have somewhat risen, the 
rise is clearly attributable to other causes. In more 
places they have fallen — that is, where it has been pos- 
sible for them to fall — for there is a minimum below 
*- _• 

* Systems of Land Tenure, published by the Cobden Club 



288 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Boole V, 

which laborers cannot keep up their numbers. And, 
everywhere, wages, as a proportion of the produce, have 
decreased. 

How the Black Death brought about the great rise of 
wages in England in the Fourteenth Century is clearly 
discernible, in the efforts of the land holders to regulate 
wages by statute. That that awful reduction in popula- 
tion, instead of increasing, really reduced the effective 
power of labor, there can be no doubt; but the lessening 
of competition for land still more greatly reduced rent, 
and wages advanced so largely that force and penal laws 
were called in to keep them down. The reverse effect 
followed the monopolization of land that went on iv, 
England during the reign of Henry VIII., in the inclo- 
sure of commons and the division of the church lands 
between the panders and parasites who were thus en- 
abled to found noble families. The result was the same 
as that to which a speculative increase in land values 
tends. According to Malthus (who, in his "Principles of 
Political Economy," mentions the fact without connect- 
ing it with land tenures), in the reign of Henry VII., 
half a bushel of wheat would purchase but little more 
than a day's common labor, but in the latter part of the 
reign of Elizabeth, half a bushel of wheat would purchase 
three days' common labor. I can hardly believe that the 
reduction in wages could have been so great as this com- 
parison would indicate; but that there was a reduction in 
common wages, and great distress among the laboring 
classes, is evident from the complaints of "sturdy 
vagrants" and the statutes made to suppress them. The 
rapid monopolization of the land, the carrying of the 
speculative rent line beyond the normal rent line, pro- 
duced tramps and paupers, just as like effects from like 
causes have lately been evident in the United States. 

"Land which went heretofore for twenty or forty 
pounds a y«»-7\." said Hugh Latimer, "now is let for fifty 



Chap. II THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 289 

or a hundred. My father was a yeoman, and had no 
lands of his own; only he had a farm at a rent of three or 
four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and thereupon 
he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had 
walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty 
kine; he was able and did find the King a harness with 
himself and his horse when he came to the place that he 
should receive the King's wages. I can remember that I 
buckled his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. 
He kept me to school; he married my sisters with five 
pound apiece, so that he brought them up in godliness 
and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his neighbors 
and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did 
of the same farm, where he that now hath it payeth six- 
teen pounds rent or more by year, and is not able to do 
anything for his Prince, for himself, nor for his children, 
nor to give a cup of drink to the poor." 

"In this way," said Sir Thomas More, referring to the 
ejectment of small farmers which characterized this ad- 
vance of rent, "it comes to pass that these poor wretches, 
men, women, husbands, orphans, widows, parents with 
little children, householders greater in number than in 
wealth, all of these emigrate from their native fields, 
without knowing where to go." 

And so from the stuff of the Latimers and Mores — ■ 
from the sturdy spirit that amid the flames of the Oxford 
stake cried, "Play the man, Master Eidley!" and the 
mingled strength and sweetness that neither prosperity 
could taint nor the ax of the executioner abash — were 
evolved thieves and vagrants, the mass of criminality and 
pauperism that still blights the innermost petals and preys 
a gnawing worm at the root of England's rose. 

But it were as well to cite historical illustrations of 
the attraction of gravitation. The principle is as uni- 
versal and as obvious. That rent must reduce wages, is 
as clear as that the greater the subtractor the less the 



290 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Boole V. 

remainder. That rent does reduce wages, any one, 
wherever situated, can see by merely looking around 
him. 

There is no mystery as to the cause which so suddenly 
and so largely raised wages in California in 1849, and in 
Australia in 1852. It was the discovery of the placer 
mines in unappropriated land to which labor was free 
that raised the wages of cooks in San Francisco restau- 
rants to $500 a month, and left ships to rot in the harbor 
without officers or crew until their owners would consent 
to pay rates that in any other part of the globe seemed 
fabulous. Had these mines been on appropriated land, 
or had they been immediately monopolized so that rent 
could have arisen, it would have been land values that 
would have leaped upward, not wages. The Oomstock 
lode has been richer than the placers, but the Comstock 
lode was readily monopolized, and it is only by virtue of 
the strong organization of the Miners' Association and 
the fears of the damage which it might do, that enables 
men to get four dollars a day for parboiling themselves 
two thousand feet underground, where the air that they 
breathe must be pumped down to them. The wealth of 
the Comstock lode has added to rent. The selling price 
of these mines runs up into hundreds of millions, and it 
has produced individual fortunes whose monthly returns 
can be estimated only in hundreds of thousands, if not in 
millions. Nor is there any mystery about the cause 
which has operated to reduce wages in California from 
the maximum of the early days to very nearly a level 
with wages in the Eastern States, and that is still operat- 
ing to reduce them. The productiveness of labor has not 
decreased, on the contrary it has increased, as I have be- 
fore shown; but, out of what it produces labor has now 
to pay rent. As the placer deposits were exhausted, 
labor had to resort to the deeper mines and to agricul- 
tural land, but monopolization of these being permitted, 



Chap. 11. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 291 

men now walk the streets of San Francisco ready to go to 
work for almost anything — for natural opportunities are 
now no longer free to labor. 

The truth is self-evident. Put to any one capable of 
consecutive thought this question: 

"Suppose there should arise from the English Channel 
or the German Ocean a No-man's land on which common 
labor to an unlimited amount should be able to make ten 
shillings a day and which should remain unappropriated 
and of free access, like the commons which once com- 
prised so large a part of English soil. What would be 
the effect upon wages in England?'' 

He would at once tell you that common wages 
throughout England must soon increase to ten shillings 
a day. 

And in response to another question, "What would be 
the effect on rents?" he would at a moment's reflection 
say that rents must necessarily fall; and if he thought out 
the next step he would tell you that all this would hap- 
pen without any very large part of English labor being 
diverted to the new natural opportunities, or the forms 
and direction of industry being much changed; only that 
kind of production being abandoned which now yields to 
labor and to landlord together less than labor could se- 
cure on the new opportunities. The great rise in wages 
would be at the expense of rent. 

Take now the same mau or another — some hard-headed 
business man, who has no theories, but knows how to 
make money. Say to him: "Here is a little village; in 
ten years it will be a great city — in ten years the railroad 
will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric 
light of the candle; it will abound with all the ma- 
chinery and improvements that so enormously multiply 
the effective power of labor. Will, in ten years, interest 
be any higher?" 

He will tell you, "No!" 



292 THE PROBLEM SOLVED. Book V, 

"Will the wages of common labor be any higher; will 
it be easier for a man who has nothing but his labor to 
make an independent living?" 

He will tell you, "No; the wages of common labor will 
not be any higher; on the contrary, all the chances are 
that they will be lower; it will not be easier for the mere 
laborer to make an independent living; the chances are 
that it will be harder." 

"What, then, will be higher?" 

"Kent; the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of 
ground, and hold possession." 

And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, 
you need do nothing more. You may sit down and 
smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni 
of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a 
balloon, or down a hole in the ground; and without doing 
one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the 
wealth of the community, in ten years you will be rich! 
In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion; but 
among its public buildings will be an almshouse. 

In all our long investigation we have been advancing 
to this simple truth: That as land is necessary to the 
exertion of labor in the production of wealth, to com- 
mand the land which is necessary to labor, is to command 
all the fruits of labor save enough to enable labor to 
exist. We have been advancing as through an enemy's 
country, in which every step must be secured, every posi- 
tion fortified, and every by-path explored; for this simple 
truth, in its application to social and political problems, is 
hid from the great masses of men partly by its very 
simplicity, and in greater part by widespread fallacies 
and erroneous habits of thought which lead them to look 
in every direction but the right one for an explanation 
of the evils which oppress and threaten the civilized 
world. And back of these elaborate fallacies and mis- 
leading theories is an active, energetic power, a power 



Chap. II. THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY. 293 

that in every country, be its political forms what they 
may, writes laws and molds thought — the power of a vast 
and dominant pecuniary interest. 

But so simple and so clear is this truth, that to see it 
fully once is always to recognize it. There are pictures 
which, though looked at again and again, present only a 
confused labyrinth of lines or scroll work — a landscape, 
trees, or something of the kind — until once the attention 
is called to the fact that these things make up a face or a 
figure. This relation once recognized, is always after- 
ward clear. It is so in this case. In the light of this 
truth all social facts group themselves in an orderly re- 
lation, and the most diverse phenomena are seen to 
spring from one great principle. It is not in the rela- 
tions of capital and labor; it is not in the pressure of 
population against subsistence, that an explanation of 
the unequaled development of our civilization is to be 
found. The great cause of inequality in the distribution 
of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The 
ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which 
ultimately determines the social, the political, and con- 
sequently the intellectual and moral condition of a peo- 
ple. And it must be so. For land is the habitation of 
man, the storehouse upon which he must draw for all his 
needs, the material to which his labor must be applied 
for the supply of all his desires; for even the products 
of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun enjoyed, 
or any of the forces of nature utilized, without the use 
of land or its products. On the land we are born, from 
it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as 
truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field. 
Take away from man all that belongs to land, and he is 
but a disembodied spirit. Material progress cannot rid 
us of our dependence upon land; it can but add to the 
power of producing wealth from land; and hence, when 
land is monopolized, it might go on to infinity without 



294 THE PKOBLEM SOLVED. Book V. 

increasing wages or improving the condition of those who 
have but their labor. It can but add to the value of 
land and the power which its possession gives. Every- 
where, in all times, among all peoples, the possession of 
land is the base of aristocracy, the foundation of great 
fortunes, the source of power. As said the Brahmins, 
ages ago — 

"To tvhomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him be- 
long the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants mad 
ivith pride are the flowers of a grant of land" 









BOOK VI. 

THE KEMEDY 



CHAPTER I. — INSUFFICIENCY OF REMEDIES CURRENTLY 

ADVOCATED. 
CHAPTER II. — THE TRUE REMEDY. 



, 



A new and fair division of the goods and rights of this world 
should be the main object of those who conduct human affairs. — 
De Tocqueville. 



When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, 
small means do not merely produce small effects ; they produce nc 
effect at all. — John Stuart MilL 



CHAPTER I. 

INSUFFICIENCY OF REMEDIES CURRENTLY ADVOCATED. 

In tracing to its source the cause of increasing poverty 
amid advancing wealth, we have discovered the remedy; 
but before passing to that branch of our subject it will 
be well to review the tendencies or remedies which are 
currently relied on or advocated. The remedy to which 
our conclusions point is at once radical and simple — so 
radical that, on the one side, it will not be fairly consid- 
ered so long as any faith remains in the efficacy of less 
caustic measures; so simple that, on the other side, its 
real efficacy and comprehensiveness are likely to be over- 
looked, until the effect of more elaborate measures is 
estimated. 

The tendencies and measures which current literature 
and discussions show to be more or less relied on or ad- 
vocated as calculated to relieve poverty and distress 
among the masses may be divided into six classes. I do 
not mean that there are so many distinct parties or 
schools of thought, but merely that, for the purpose of 
our inquiry, prevailing opinions and proposed measures 
may be so grouped for review. Eemedies which for the 
sake of greater convenience and clearness we shall con- 
sider separately are often combined in thought. 

There are many persons who still retain a comfortable 
belief that material progress will ultimately extirpate 
poverty, and there are many who look to prudential re- 
straint upon the increase of population as the most 
efficacious means, but the fallacy of these views has al- 



298 THE REMEDY. Book VI. 

ready been sufficiently shown. Let us now consider what 
may be hoped for: 

I. From greater economy in government. 

II. From the better education of the working classes 
and improved habits of industry and thrift. 

III. From combinations of workmen for the advance 
of wages. 

IV. From the co-operation of labor and capital. 
V. From governmental direction and interference. 

VI. From a more general distribution of land. 

Under these six heads I think we may in essential form 
review all hopes and propositions for the relief of social 
distress short of the simple but far-reaching measure 
which I shall propose. 

/. — From Greater Economy in Government. 

Until a very few years ago it was an article of faith 
with Americans — a belief shared by European liberals — 
that the poverty of the down-trodden masses of the Old 
World was due to aristocratic and monarchical institu- 
tions. This belief has rapidly passed away with the ap- 
pearance in the United States, under republican institu- 
tions, of social distress of the same kind, if not of the 
same intensity, as that prevailing in Europe. But social 
distress is still largely attributed to the immense burdens 
which existing governments impose — the great debts, 
the military and naval establishments, the extravagance 
which is characteristic as well of republican as of mo- 
narchical rulers, and especially characteristic of the ad- 
ministration of great cities. To these must be added, in 
the United States, the robbery involved in the protective 
tariff, which for every twenty-five cents it puts in the 
treasury takes a dollar and it may be four or five out of 
the pocket of the consumer. Now, there seems to be an 
evident connection between the immense sums thus 
taken from the people and the privations of the lower 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 299 

classes, and it is upon a superficial view natural to sup- 
pose that a reduction in the enormous burdens thus 
uselessly imposed would make it easier for the poorest to 
get a living. But a consideration of the matter in the 
light of the economic principles heretofore traced out 
will show that this would not be the effect. A reduction 
in the amount taken from the aggregate produce of a 
community by taxation would be simply equivalent to 
an increase in the power of net production. It would in 
effect add to the productive power of labor just as do the 
increasing density of population and improvement in the 
arts. And as the advantage in the one case goes, and 
must go, to the owners of land, in increased rent, so 
would the advantage in the other. 

From the produce of the labor and capital of England 
are now supported the burden of an immense debt, an 
Established Church, an expensive royal family, a large 
number of sinecurists, a great army and great navy. 
Suppose the debt repudiated, the Church disestablished, 
the royal family set adrift to make a living for them- 
selves, the sinecurists cut off, the army disbanded, the 
officers and men of the navy discharged and the ships 
sold. An enormous reduction in taxation would thus 
become possible. There would be a great addition to 
the net produce which remains to be distributed among 
the parties to production. But it would be only such an 
addition as improvement in the arts has been for a long 
time constantly making, and not so great an addition as 
steam and machinery have made within the last twenty 
or thirty years. And as these additions have not allevi- 
ated pauperism, but have only increased rent, so would 
this. English land owners would reap the whole ben- 
efit. I will not dispute that if all these things could be 
done suddenly, and without the destruction and expense 
involved in a revolution, there might be a temporary im- 
provement in the condition of the lowest class] but such 



300 THE REMEDY. Book Vl 

a sudden and peaceable reform is manifestly impossible. 
And if it were, any temporary improvement would, by 
the process we now see going on in the United States, 
be ultimately swallowed up by increased land values. 

And, so, in the United States, if we were to reduce 
public expenditures to the lowest possible point, and meet 
them by revenue taxation, the benefit could certainly 
not be greater than that which railroads have brought. 
There would be more wealth left in the hands of the peo- 
ple as a whole, just as the railroads have put more wealth 
in the hands of the people as a whole, but the same in- 
exorable laws would operate as to its distribution. The 
condition of those who live by their labor would not ulti- 
mately be improved. 

A dim consciousness of this pervades — or, rather, is 
beginning to pervade — the masses, and constitutes one 
of the grave political difficulties that are closing in 
around the American republic. Those who have nothing 
but their labor, and especially the proletarians of the 
cities — a growing class — care little about the prodigality 
of government, and in many cases are disposed to lool 
upon it as a good thing — "furnishing employment," o] 
"putting money in circulation." Tweed, who robbed 
New York as a guerrilla chief might levy upon a cap- 
tured town (and who was but a type of the new banditti 
who are grasping the government of all our cities), was 
undoubtedly popular with a majority of the voters, 
though his thieving was notorious, and his spoils were 
blazoned in big diamonds and lavish personal expendi- 
ture. After his indictment, he was triumphantly elected 
to the Senate; and, even when a recaptured fugitive, 
was frequently cheered on his way from court to prison. 
He had robbed the public treasury of many millions, but 
the proletarians felt that he had not robbed them. And 
the verdict of political economy is the same as theirs. 

Let me be clearly understood. I do not say that gov- 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 301 

ernmental economy is not desirable; but simply that re- 
duction in the expenses of government can have no 
direct effect in extirpating poverty and increasing wages, 
so long as land is monopolized. 

Although this is true, yet even with sole reference to 
the interests of the lowest class, no effort should be 
spared to keep down useless expenditures. The more 
complex and extravagant government becomes, the more 
it gets to be a power distinct from and independent of 
the people, and the more difficult does it become to bring 
questions of real public policy to a popular decision. 
Look at our elections in the United States — upon what 
do they turn? The most momentous problems are press- 
ing upon us, yet so great is the amount of money in poli- 
tics, so large are the personal interests involved, that the 
most important questions of government are but little 
considered. The average American voter has prejudices, 
party feelings, general notions of a certain kind, but he 
gives to the fundamental questions of government not 
much more thought than a street-car horse does to the 
profits of the line. Were this not the case, so many hoary 
abuses could not have survived and so many new ones 
been added. Anything that tends to make government 
simple and inexpensive tends to put it under control of 
the people and to bring questions of real importance to 
the front. But no reduction in the expenses of govern- 
ment can of itself cure or mitigate the evils that arise 
from a constant tendency to the unequal distribution of 
wealth. 

II. — From the Diffusion of Education and Improved 
Habits of Industry and Thrift. 

There is, and always has been, a widespread belief 
among the more comfortable classes that the poverty and 
suffering of the masses are due to their lack of industry, 
frugality, and intelligence. This belief, which at once 



302 THE REMEDY. Book VI 

soothes the sense of responsibility and flatters by its sug- 
gestion of superiority, is probably even more prevalent 
in countries like the United States, where all men are 
politically equal, and where, owing to the newness of 
society, the differentiation into classes has been of indi- 
viduals rather than of families, than it is in older coun- 
tries, where the lines of separation have been longer, and 
are more sharply, drawn. It is but natural for those who 
can trace their own better circumstances to the superior 
industry and frugality that gave them a start, and the 
superior intelligence that enabled them to take advantage 
of every opportunity,* to imagine that those who remain 
poor do so simply from lack of these qualities. 

But whoever has grasped the laws of the distribution 
of wealth, as in previous chapters they have been traced 
out, will see the mistake in this notion. The fallacy is 
similar to that which would be involved in the assertion 
that every one of a number of competitors might win a 
race. That anyone might is true; that every one might 
is impossible. 

For, as soon as land acquires a value, wages, as we 
have seen, do not depend upon the real earnings or prod- 
uct of labor, but upon what is left to labor after rent is 
taken out; and when land is all monopolized, as it is 
everywhere except in the newest communities, rent must 
drive wages down to the point at which the poorest paid 
class will be just able to live and reproduce, and thus 
wages are forced to a minimum fixed by what is called 
the standard of comfort — that is, the amount of neces- 
saries and comforts which habit leads the working classes 
to demand as the lowest on which they will consent to 
maintain their numbers. This being the case, industry, 

* To say nothing of superior want of conscience, which is often 
the determining quality which makes a millionaire out of one who 
otherwise might have been a poor man. 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PKOPOSED REMEDIES. 303 

skill, frugality, and intelligence can avail the individual 
only in so far as they are superior to the general level — • 
just as in a race speed can avail the runner only in so far 
as it exceeds that of his competitors. If one man work 
harder, or with superior skill or intelligence than ordi- 
nary, he will get ahead; but if the average of industry, 
skill, or intelligence be brought up to the higher point, 
the increased intensity of application will secure but the 
old rate of wages, and he who would get ahead must 
work harder still. 

One individual may save money from his wages by liv- 
ing as Dr. Franklin did when, during his apprenticeship 
and early journeyman days, he concluded to practice 
vegetarianism; and many poor families might be made 
more comfortable by being taught to prepare the cheap 
dishes to which Franklin tried to limit the appetite of his 
employer Keimer, as a condition to his acceptance of the 
position of confuter of opponents to the new religion of 
which Keimer wished to become the prophet,* but if the 
working classes generally came to live in that way, wages 
would ultimately fall in proportion, and whoever wished 
to get ahead by the practice of economy, or to mitigate 
poverty by teaching it, would be compelled to devise 
some still cheaper mode of keeping soul and body to- 
gether. If, under existing conditions, American me- 
chanics would come down to the Chinese standard of 
living, they would ultimately have to come down to the 
Chinese standard of wages; or if English laborers would 
content themselves with the rice diet and scanty clothing 
of the Bengalee, labor would soon be as ill paid in Eng- 
land as in Bengal. The introduction of the potato into 
Ireland was expected to improve the condition of the 
poorer classes, by increasing the difference between the 

* Franklin, in his inimitable way, relates how Keimer finally broke 
his resolution and ordering a roast pig invited two lady friends to 
dine with him, but the pig being brought in before the company ar- 
rived, Keimer could not resist the temntation and ate it all himself. 



3C4 THE KEMEDY. Book Yl 

wages they received and the cost of their living. The 
consequences that did ensue were a rise of rent and a 
lowering of wages, and, with the potato blight, the rav- 
ages of famine among a population that had already re- 
duced its standard of comfort so low that the next step 
was starvation. 

And, so, if one individual work more hours than the 
average, he will increase his wages; but the wages of all 
cannot be increased in this way. It is notorious that in 
occupations where working hours are long, wages are not 
higher than where working hours are shorter; generally 
the reverse, for the longer the working day, the more 
helpless does the laborer become — the less time has he to 
look around him and develop other powers than those 
called forth by his work; the less becomes his ability to 
change his occupation or to take advantage of circum- 
stances. And, so, the individual workman who gets his 
wife and children to assist him may thus increase his in- 
come; but in occupations where it has become habitual 
for the wife and children of the laborer to supplement his 
work, it is notorious that the wages earned by the whole 
family do not on the average exceed those of the head of 
the family in occupations whero it is usual for him only 
to work. Swiss family labor in watch making competes 
in cheapness with American machinery. The Bohemian 
cigar makers of New York, who work, men, women, and 
children, in their tenement-house rooms, have reduced 
the prices of cigar making to less than the Chinese in 
San Francisco were getting. 

These general facts are well known. They are fully 
recognized in standard politico -economic works, where, 
however, they are explained upon the Malthusian theory 
of the tendency of population to multiply up to the 
limit of subsistence. The true explanation, as I have 
sufficiently shown, is in the tendency of rent to reduce 
wages. 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 305 

As to the effects of education, it may be worth while 
to say a few words specially, for there is a prevailing dis- 
position to attribute to it something like a magical influ- 
ence. Now, education is only education in so far as it 
enables a man more effectively to use his natural powers, 
and this is something that what we call education in very 
great part fails to do. I remember a little girl, pretty 
well along in her school geography and astronomy, who 
was much astonished to find that the ground in her 
mother's back yard was really the surface of the earth, 
and, if you talk with them, you will find that a good deal 
of the knowledge of many college graduates is much like 
that of the little girl. They seldom think any better, 
and sometimes not so well as men who have never been 
to college. 

A gentleman who had spent many years in Australia, 
and knew intimately the habits of the aborigines (Eev. 
Dr. Bleesdale), after giving some instances of their won- 
derful skill in the use of their weapons, in foretelling 
changes in the wind and weather and in trapping the 
shyest birds, once said to me: "I think it a great mis- 
take to look on these black fellows as ignorant. Their 
knowledge is different from ours, but in it they are gen- 
erally better educated. As soon as they begin to toddle, 
they are taught to play with little boomerangs and otheT 
weapons, to observe and to judge, and, when they are 
old enough to take care of themselves, they are fully able 
to do so — are, in fact, in reference to the nature of their 
knowledge, what I should call well-educated gentlemen; 
which is more than I can say for many of our young fel- 
lows who have had what we call the best advantages, but 
who enter upon manhood unable to do anything either 
for themselves or for others." 

Be this as it may, it is evident that intelligence, which 
is or should be the aim of education, until it induces and 
enables the masses to discover and remove the cause of 



1300 THE KEMEDY. Book VI 

the unequal distribution of wealth, can operate upon 
wages only by increasing the effective power of labor. It 
has the same effect as increased skill or industry. And 
it can raise the wages of the individual only in so far as 
it renders him superior to others. When to read and 
write were rare accomplishments, a clerk commanded 
high respect and large wages, but now the ability to read 
and write has become so nearly universal as to give no 
advantage. Among the Chinese the ability to read and 
write seems absolutely universal, but wages in China 
touch the lowest possible point. The diffusion of intel- 
ligence, except as it may make men discontented with a 
state of things which condemns producers to a life of toil 
while non-producers loll in luxury, cannot tend to raise 
wages generally, or in any way improve the condition of 
the lowest class — the "mud-sills" of society, as a South- 
ern Senator once called them — who must rest on the soil, 
no matter how high the superstructure may be carried. 
No increase of the effective power of labor can increase 
general wages, so long as rent swallows up all the gain. 
This is not merely a deduction from principles. It is the 
fact, proved by experience. The growth of knowledge 
and the progress of invention have multiplied the effective 
power of labor over and over again without increasing 
wages. In England there are over a million paupers. 
In the United States almshouses are increasing and 
wages are decreasing. 

It is true that greater industry and skill, greater pru- 
dence, and a higher intelligence, are, as a rule, found 
associated with a better material condition of the work- 
ing classes; but that this is effect, not cause, is shown by 
the relation of the facts. Wherever the material condi- 
tion of the laboring classes has been improved, improve- 
ment in their personal qualities has followed, and wher- 
ever their material condition has been depressed, deterio- 
ration in these Qualities has been the result; but nowhere 



Chap. 1. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 307 

can improvement in material condition be shown as the 
result of the increase of industry, skill, prudence, or in- 
telligence in a class condemned to toil for a bare living, 
though these qualities when once attained (or, rather, 
their concomitant — the improvement in the standard of 
comfort) offer a strong, and, in many cases, a sufficient, 
resistance to the lowering of material condition. 

The fact is, that the qualities that raise man above the 
animal are superimposed on those which he shares with 
the animal, and that it is only as he is relieved from the 
wants of his animal nature that his intellectual and moral 
nature can grow. Compel a man to drudgery for the 
necessities of animal existence, and he will lose the in- 
centive to industry — the progenitor of skill — and will 
do only what he is forced to do. Make his condition 
such that it cannot be much worse, while there is little 
hope that anything he can do will make it much better, 
and he will cease to look beyond the day. Deny him 
leisure — and leisure does not mean the want of employ- 
ment, but the absence of the need which forces to uncon- 
genial employment — and you cannot, even by running 
the child through a common school and supplying the 
man with a newspaper, make him intelligent. 

It is true that improvement in the material condition 
of a people or class may not show immediately in mental 
and moral improvement. Increased wages may at first 
be taken out in idleness and dissipation. But they will 
ultimately bring increased industry, skill, intelligence, 
and thrift. Comparisons between different countries; 
between different classes in the same country; between 
the same people at different periods; and between the 
same people when their conditions are changed by emi- 
gration, show, as an invariable result, that the personal 
qualities of which we are speaking appear as material 
conditions are improved, and disappear as material con- 
ditions are depressed. Poverty \s- the Slough of Despond 



308 THE REMEDY. Book VI 

which Bunyan saw in his dream, and into which good 
books may be tossed forever without result. To make 
people industrious, prudent, skillful, and intelligent, 
they must be relieved from want. If you would have the 
slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first 
make him free. 

III. — From Combinations of Workmen. 

It is evident from the laws of distribution, as pre- 
viously traced, that combinations of workmen can ad- 
vance wages, and this not at the expense of other work- 
men, as is sometimes said, nor yet at the expense of 
capital, as is generally believed; but, ultimately, at the 
expense of rent. That no general advance in wages can 
be secured by combination; that any advance in particu- 
lar wages thus secured must reduce other wages or the 
profits of capital, or both — are ideas that spring from the 
erroneous notion that wages are drawn from capital. 
The fallacy of these ideas is demonstrated, not alone by 
the laws of distribution as we have worked them out, but 
by experience, so far as it has gone. The advance of 
wages in particular trades by combinations of workmen, 
of which there are many examples, has nowhere shown 
any effect in lowering wages in other trades, or in reduc- 
ing the rate of profits. Except as it may affect his fixed 
capital or current engagements, a diminution of wages 
can benefit, and an increase of wages injure an employer 
only in so far as it gives him an advantage or puts 
him at a disadvantage as compared with other employers. 
The employer who first succeeds in reducing the wages 
of his hands, or is first compelled to pay an advance, 
gains an advantage, or is put at a disadvantage in regard 
to his competitors, which ceases when the movement in- 
cludes them also. So far, however, as the change in 
wages affects his contracts or stock on hand, by changing 
the relative cost of production, it may be to him a real 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 309 

gain or loss, though this gain or loss, being purely rela- 
tive, disappears when the whole community is consid- 
ered. And, if the change in wages works a change in 
relative demand, it may render capital fixed in machin- 
ery, buildings, or otherwise, more or less profitable. 
But, in this, anew equilibrium is soon reached; for, 
especially in a progressive country, fixed capital is only 
somewhat less mobile than circulating capital. If there 
is too little in a certain form, the tendency of capital to 
assume that form soon brings it up to the required 
amount; if there is too much, the cessation of increment 
soon restores the level. 

But, while a change in the rate of wages in any par- 
ticular occupation may induce a change in the relative 
demand for labor, it can produce no change in the ag- 
gregate demand. For instance, let us suppose that a 
combination of the workmen engaged in any particular 
manufacture raise wages in one country, while a combi- 
nation of employers reduce wages in the same manufac- 
ture in another country. If the change be great 
enough, the demand, or part of the demand, in the first 
country will now be supplied by importation of such 
manufactures from the second. But, evidently, this in- 
crease in importations of a particular kind must neces- 
sitate either a corresponding decrease in importations of 
other kinds, or a corresponding increase in exportations. 
For, it is only with the produce of its labor and capital 
that one country can demand, or can obtain, in exchange, 
the produce of the labor and capital of another. The 
idea that the lowering of wages can increase, or the in- 
crease of wages can diminish, the trade of a country, is 
as baseless as the idea that the prosperity of a country 
can be increased by taxes on imports, or diminished by 
the removal of restrictions on trade. If all wages in any 
particular country were to be doubled, that country 
would continue to export and import the same things, 



310 THE REMEDY. Booh VI. 

and in the same proportions; for exchange is determined 
not by absolute, but by relative, cost of production. 
But, if wages in some branches of production were 
doubled, and in others not increased, or not increased so 
much, there would be a change in the proportion of the 
various things imported, but no change in the proportion 
between exports and imports. 

While most of the objections made to the combination 
of workmen for the advance of wages are thus baseless, 
while the success of such combinations cannot reduce 
other wages, or decrease the profits of capital, or injuri- 
ously affect national prosperity, yet so great are the diffi- 
culties in the way of the effective combinations of labor- 
ers, that the good that can be accomplished by them is 
extremely limited, while there are inherent disadvantages 
in the process. 

To raise wages in a particular occupation or occupa- 
tions, which is all that any combination of workmen yet 
made has been equal to attempting, is manifestly a task 
the difficulty of which progressively increases. For the 
higher are wages of any particular kind raised above their 
normal level with other wages, the stronger are the tend- 
encies to bring them back. Thus, if a printers' union, 
by a successful or threatened strike, raise the wages of 
typesetting ten per cent, above the normal rate as com- 
pared with other wages, relative demand and supply are 
at once affected. On the one hand, there is a tendency 
to a diminution of the amount of typesetting called for; 
and, on the other, the higher rate of wages tends to in- 
crease the number of compositors in ways the strongest 
combination cannot altogether prevent. If the increase 
be twenty per cent., these tendencies are much stronger; 
if it is fifty per cent., they become stronger still, and so 
on. So that practically — even in countries like England, 
where the lines between different trades are much more 
distinct and difficult to pass than in countries like the 



Chap.L INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 311 

United States — that which trades' unions, even when 
supporting each other, can do in the way of raising wages 
is comparatively little, and this little, moreover, is con- 
fined to their own sphere, and does not affect the lower 
stratum of unorganized laborers, whose condition most 
needs alleviation and ultimately determines that of all 
above them. The only way by which wages could be 
raised to any extent and with any permanence by this 
method would be by a general combination, such as was 
aimed at by the Internationals, which should include 
laborers of all kinds. But such a combination may be 
set down as practically impossible, for the difficulties of 
combination, great enough in the most highly paid and 
smallest trades, become greater and greater as we descend 
in the industrial scale. 

Nor, in the struggle of endurance, which is the only 
method which combinations not to work for less than a 
certain minimum have of effecting the increase of wages, 
must it be forgotten who are the real parties pitted 
against each other. It is not labor and capital. It is 
laborers on the one side and the owners of land on the 
other. If the contest were between labor and capital, it 
would be on much more equal terms. For the power of 
capital to stand out is only some little greater than that 
of labor. Capital not only ceases to earn anything when 
not used, but it goes to waste — for in nearly all its forms 
it can be maintained only by constant reproduction. But 
land will not starve like laborers or go to waste like capi- 
tal — its owners can wait. They may be inconvenienced, 
it is true, but what is inconvenience to them, is destruc- 
tion to capital and starvation to labor. 

The agricultural laborers in certain parts of England 
are now endeavoring to combine for the purpose of secur- 
ing an increase in their miserably low wages. If it was 
capital that was receiving the enormous difference be- 
tween the real produce of their labor and the pittance 



312 THE REMEDY. Booh VI. 

they get out of it, they would have but to make an 
effective combination to secure success; for the farmers, 
who are their direct employers, can afford to go without 
labor but little, if any, better than the laborers can afford 
to go without wages. But the farmers cannot yield 
much without a reduction of rent; and thus it is between 
the land owners and the laborers that the real struggle 
must come. Suppose the combination to be so thorough 
as to include all agricultural laborers, and to prevent 
from doing so all who might be tempted to take their 
places. The laborers refuse to work except at a consid- 
erable advance of wages; the farmers can give it only by 
securing a considerable reduction of rent, and have no 
way to back their demands except as the laborers back 
theirs, by refusing to go on with production. If culti- 
vation thus comes to a dead-lock, the land owners would 
lose only their rent, while the land improved by lying 
fallow. But the laborers would starve. And if English 
laborers of all kinds were united in one grand league for 
a general increase of wages, the real contest would be the 
same, and under the same conditions. For wages could 
not be increased except to the decrease of rent; and in a 
general dead-lock, land owners could live, while laborers 
of all sorts must starve or emigrate. The owners of the 
land of England are by virtue of their ownership the 
masters of England. So true is it that "to whomsoever 
the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of 
it." The white parasols and the elephants mad with 
pride passed with the grant of English land, and the peo- 
ple at large can never regain their power until that grant 
is resumed. What is true of England, is universally 
true. 

It may be said that such a dead-lock in production 
could never occur. This is true; but true only because 
no such thorough combination of labor as might produce 
it is possible. But the fixed and definite nature of land 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 313 

enables land owners to combine much more easily and 
efficiently than either laborers or capitalists. How easy 
and efficient their combination is, there are many his- 
torical examples. And the absolute necessity for the use 
of land, and the certainty in all progressive countries 
that it must increase in value, produce among land 
owners, without any formal combination, all the effects 
that could be produced by the most rigorous combination 
among laborers or capitalists. Deprive ? Uborer of op- 
portunity of employment, and he will soon be anxious to 
get work on any terms, but when the receding wave of 
speculation leaves nominal land values clearly above real 
values, whoever has lived in a growing country knows 
with what tenacity land owners hold on. 

And, besides these practical difficulties in the plan of 
forcing by endurance an increase of wages, there are in 
such methods inherent disadvantages which workingmen 
should not blink. I speak without prejudice, for I am 
still an honorary member of the union which, while 
working at my trade, I always loyally supported. But, 
see: The methods by which a trade union can alone act 
are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily 
tyrannical. A strike, which is the only recourse by 
which a trade union can enforce its demands, is a de- 
structive contest — just such a contest as that to which 
an eccentric, called "The Money King/' once, in the 
early days of San Francisco, challenged a man who 
had taunted him with meanness, that they should go 
down to the wharf and alternately toss twenty-dollar 
pieces into the bay until one gave in. The struggle of 
endurance involved in a strike is, really, what it has 
often been compared to — a war; and, like all war, it 
lessens wealth. And the organization for it must, like 
the organization for war, be tyrannical. As even the 
man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters 
#,n army, give up his personal freedom and become a 



314 THE REMEDY. Book VL 

mer^ part in a great machine, so must it be with work- 
men who organize for a strike. These combinations are, 
therefore, necessarily destructive of the very things 
which workmen seek to gain through them — wealth and 
freedom. j 

There is an ancient Hindoo mode of compelling the 
payment of a just debt, traces of something akin to 
which Sir Henry Maine has found in the laws of the 
Irish Brehons. It is called, sitting dharna — the creditor 
seeking enforcement of his debt by sitting down at the 
door of the debtor, and refusing to eat or drink until he 
is paid. 

Like this is the method of labor combinations. In 
their strikes, trades' unions sit dharna. But, unlike the 
Hindoo, they have not the power of superstition to back 
them, 

IV. — From Co-operation. 

It is now, and has been for some time, the fashion to 
preach co-operation as the sovereign remedy for the 
grievances of the working classes. But, unfortunately 
for the efficacy of co-operation as a remedy for social 
evils, these evils, as we have seen, do not arise from any 
conflict between labor and capital; and if co-operation 
were universal, it could not raise wages or relieve pov- 
erty. This is readily seen. 

Co-operation is of two kinds — co-operation in supply 
and co-operation in production. Now, co-operation in 
supply, let it go as far as it may in excluding middlemen, 
only reduces the cost of exchanges. It is simply a device 
to save labor and eliminate risk, and its effect upon dis- 
tribution can be only that of the improvements and 
inventions which have in modern times so wonderfully 
cheapened and facilitated exchanges — viz., to increase 
rent. And co-operation in production is simply a rever- 
sion to that form of wages which still prevails in the 



Chap. L INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 315 

whaling service, and is there termed a "lay." It is the 
substitution of proportionate wages for fixed wages — a 
substitution of which there are occasional instances in 
almost all employments; 01% if the management is left to 
the workmen, and the capitalist but takes his proportion 
of the net produce, it is simply the system that has pre- 
vailed to a large extent in European agriculture since 
the days of the Eoman Empire — the colonial or metayer 
system. All that is claimed for co-operation in produc- 
tion is, that it makes the workman more active and in- 
dustrious — in other words, that it increases the efficiency 
of labor. Thus its effect is in the same direction as the 
steam engine, the cotton gin, the reaping machine — in 
short, all the things in which material progress consists, 
and it can produce only the same result — viz., the in- 
crease of rent. 

It is a striking proof of how first principles are ignored 
in dealing with social problems, that in current economic 
and semi-economic literature so much importance is at- 
tached to co-operation as a means for increasing wages 
and relieving poverty. That it can have no such general 
tendency is apparent. 

Waiving all the difficulties that under present condi- 
tions beset co-operation either of supply or of production, 
and supposing it so extended as to supplant present 
methods — that co-operative stores made the connection 
between producer and consumer with the minimum of 
expense, and co-operative workshops, factories, farms, 
and mines, abolished the employing capitalist who pays 
fixed wages, and greatly increased the efficiency of labor 
—what then? Why, simply that it would become pos- 
sible to produce the same amount of wealth with less 
labor, and consequently that the owners of land, the 
source of all wealth, could command a greater amount of 
wealth for the use of their land. This is not a matter 
of mere theory; it is proved by experience and by exist- 



316 THE REMEDY. Book VI. 

ing facts. Improved methods and improved machinery 
have the same effect that co-operation aims at — of reduc- 
ing the cost of bringing commodities to the consume! 
and increasing the efficiency of labor, and it is in these 
respects that the older countries have the advantage of 
new settlements. But, as experience has amply shown, 
improvements in the methods and machinery of produc- 
tion and exchange have no tendency to improve the con- 
dition of the lowest class, and wages are lower and pov- 
erty deeper where exchange goes on at the minimum of 
cost and production has the benefit of the best machinery. 
The advantage but adds to rent. 

But suppose co-operation between producers and land 
owners? That would simply amount to the payment of 
rent in kind — the same system under which much land is 
rented in California and the Southern States where the 
land owner gets a share of the crop. Save as a matter 
of computation it in no wise differs from the system 
which prevails in England of a fixed money rent. Call 
it co-operation, if you choose, the terms of the co-opera- 
tion would still be fixed by the laws which determine 
rent, and wherever land was monopolized, increase in 
productive power would simply give the owners of the 
land the power to demand a larger share. 

That co-operation is by so many believed to be the solu- 
tion of the "labor question" arises from the fact that, 
where it has been tried, it has in many instances im- 
proved perceptibly the condition of those immediately 
engaged in it. But this is due simply to the fact that 
these cases are isolated. Just as industry, economy, or 
skill may improve the condition of the workmen who 
possess them in superior degree, but cease to have this 
effect when improvement in these respects becomes gen- 
eral, so a special advantage in procuring supplies, or a 
special efficiency given to some labor, may secure advan- 
tages which would be lost as soon as these improvements 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 317 

became so general as to affect the general relations of dis- 
tribution. And the truth is, that, save possibly in edu- 
cational effects, co-operation can produce no general 
results that competition will not produce. Just as the 
cheap-for-cash stores have a similar effect upon prices as 
the co-operative supply associations, so does competition 
in production lead to a similar adjustment of forces and 
division of proceeds as would co-operative production. 
That increasing productive power does not add to the 
reward of labor, is not because of competition, but be- 
cause competition is one-sided. Land, without which 
there can be no production, is monopolized, and the 
competition of producers for its use forces wages to a 
minimum and gives all the advantage of increasing pro- 
ductive power to land owners, in higher rents and 
increased land values. Destroy this monopoly, and com- 
petition could exist only to accomplish the end which 
co-operation aims at — to give to each what he fairly 
earns. Destroy this monopoly, and industry must be- 
come the co-operation of equals. 

V. — From Governmental Direction and Interference. 

The limits within which I wish to keep this book will 
not permit an examination in detail of the methods in 
which it is proposed to mitigate or extirpate poverty by 
governmental regulation of industry and accumulation, 
and which in their most thorough-going form are called 
socialistic. Nor is it necessary, for the same defects 
attach to them all. These are the substitution of gov- 
ernmental direction for the play of individual action, and 
the attempt to secure by restriction what can better be 
secured by freedom. As to the truths that are involved 
in socialistic ideas I shall have something to say here- 
after; but it is evident that whatever savors of regulation 
and restriction is in itself bad, and should not be re- 



318 THE EEMEDY. Book VI. 

sorted to if any other mode of accomplishing the same 
end presents itself. For instance, to take one of the 
simplest and mildest of the class of measures I refer to 
— a graduated tax on incomes. The object at which it 
aims, the reduction or prevention of immense concen- 
trations of wealth, is good; but this means involves the 
employment of a large number of officials clothed with 
inquisitorial powers; temptations to bribery, and per- 
jury, and all other means of evasion, which beget a 
•demoralization of opinion, and put a premium upon un- 
scrupulousness and a tax upon conscience; and, finally, 
just in proportion as the tax accomplishes its effect, a 
lessening in the incentive to the accumulation of wealth, 
which is one of the strong forces of industrial progress. 
While, if the elaborate schemes for regulating every- 
thing and finding a place for everybody could be carried 
out, we should have a state of society resembling that of 
ancient Peru, or that which, to their eternal honor, the 
Jesuits instituted and so long maintained in Paraguay. 

I will not say that such a state as this is not a better 
social state than that to which we now seem to be tend- 
ing, for in ancient Peru, though production went on 
under the greatest disadvantages, from the want of iron 
and the domestic animals, yet there was no such thing as 
want, and the people went to their work with songs. 
But this it is unnecessary to discuss. Socialism in any- 
thing approaching such a form, modern society cannot 
successfully attempt. The only force that has ever 
proved competent for it — a strong and definite religious 
faith — is wanting and is daily growing less. We have 
passed out of the socialism of the tribal state, and cannot 
re-enter it again except by a retrogression that would 
involve anarchy and perhaps barbarism. Our govern- 
ments, as is already plainly evident, would break down 
in the attempt. Instead of an intelligent award of 
duties and earnings, we should have a Eoman distribu- 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 319 

tion of Sicilian corn, and the demagogue would soon 
become the Imperator. 

The ideal of socialism is grand and noble; and it is, I 
am convinced, possible of realization; but such a state 
of society cannot be manufactured — it must grow. Soci- 
ety is an organism, not a machine. It can live only by 
the individual life of its parts. And in the free and nat- 
ural development of all the parts will be secured the 
harmony of the whole. All that is necessary to social 
regeneration is included in the motto of those Eussian 
patriots sometimes called Nihilists — "Land and Liberty!" 

VI. — From a More General Distribution of Land. 

There is a rapidly growing feeling that the tenure of 
land is in some manner connected with the social dis- 
tress which manifests itself in the most progressive 
countries; but this feeling as yet mostly shows itself in 
propositions which look to the more general division of 
landed property — in England, free trade in land, tenant 
right, or the equal partition of landed estates among 
heirs; in the United States, restrictions upon the size of 
individual holdings. It has been also proposed in Eng- 
land that the state should buy out the landlords, and in 
the United States that grants of money should be made 
to enable the settlements of colonies upon public lands. 
The former proposition let us pass for the present; the 
latter, so far as its distinctive feature is concerned, falls 
into the category of the measures considered in the last 
section. It needs no argument to show to what abuses 
and demoralization grants of public money or credit 
would lead. 

How what the English writers call "free trade in land" 
— the removal of duties and restrictions upon convey- 
ances — -could facilitate the division of ownership in agri- 
cultural land, I cannot see, though it might to some 



320 THE REMEDY. Book VI 

extent have that effect as regards town property. The 
removal of restrictions upon buying and selling would 
merely permit the ownership of land to assume more 
quickly the form to which it tends. Now, that the tend- 
ency in Great Britain is to concentration is shown by the 
fact that, in spite of the difficulties interposed by the 
cost of transfer, land ownership has been and is steadily 
concentrating there, and that this tendency is a general 
one is shown by the fact that the same process of con- 
centration is observable in the United States. I say 
this unhesitatingly in regard to the United States, al- 
though statistical tables are sometimes quoted to show a 
different tendency. But how, in such a country as the 
United States, the ownership of land may be really con- 
centrating, while census tables show rather a diminution 
in the average size of holdings, is readily seen. As land 
is brought into use, and, with the growth of population, 
passes from a lower to a higher or intenser use, the size 
of holdings tends to diminish. A small stock range 
would be a large farm, a small farm would be a large 
orchard, vineyard, nursery, or vegetable garden, and a 
patch of land which would be small even for these pur- 
poses would make a very large city property. Thus, 
the growth of population, which puts land to higher or 
intenser uses, tends naturally to reduce the size of hold- 
ings, by a process very marked in new countries; but 
with this may go on a tendency to the concentration of 
land ownership, which, though not revealed by tables 
which show the average size of holdings, is just as clearly 
seen. Average holdings of one acre in a city may show a 
much greater concentration of land ownership than aver- 
age holdings of 640 acres in a newly settled township. I 
refer to this to show the fallacy in the deductions drawn 
from the tables which are frequently paraded in the 
United States to show that land monopoly is an evil that 
will cure itself. On the contrary, it is obvious that the 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 321 

proportion of laud owners to the whole population is 
constantly decreasing. 

And that there is in the United States, as there is in 
Great Britain, a strong tendency to the concentration of 
land ownership in agriculture is clearly seen. As, in 
England and Ireland, small farms are being thrown into 
larger ones, so in New England, according to the reports 
of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the 
size of farms increasing. This tendency is even more 
clearly noticeable in the newer States and Territories. 
Only a few years ago a farm of 320 acres would, under 
the system of agriculture prevailing in the northern 
parts of the Union, have anywhere been a large one, 
probably as much as one man could cultivate to advan- 
tage. In California now there are farms (not cattle 
ranges) of five, ten, twenty, forty and sixty thousand 
acres, while the model farm of Dakota embraces 100,000 
acres. The reason is obvious. It is the application of 
machinery to agriculture and the general tendency to 
production on a large scale. The same tendency which 
substitutes the factory, with its army of operatives, for 
many independent hand-loom weavers, is beginning to 
exhibit itself in agriculture. 

Now, the existence of this tendency shows two things: 
first, that any measures which merely permit or facilitate 
the greater subdivision of land would be inoperative; 
and, second, that any measures which would compel it 
would have a tendency to check production. If land in 
large bodies can be cultivated more cheaply than land in 
small bodies, to restrict ownership to small bodies will 
reduce the aggregate production of wealth, and, in so 
far as such restrictions are imposed and take effect, will 
they tend to diminish the general productiveness of labor 
and capital. 

The effort, therefore, tb secure a fairer division of 
wealth by such restrictions is liable to the drawback of 



322 THE REMEDY. Book VI. 

lessening the amount to be divided. The device is like 
that of the monkey, who, dividing the cheese between 
the cats, equalized matters by taking a bite off the biggest 
piece. 

But there is not merely this objection, which weighs 
against every proposition to restrict the ownership of 
land, with a force that increases with the efficiency of 
the proposed measure. There is the further and fatal 
objection that restriction will not secure the end which 
is alone worth aiming at — a fair division of the produce. 
It will not reduce rent, and therefore cannot increase 
wages. It may make the comfortable classes larger, but 
will not improve the condition of those in the lowest 
class. 

If what is known as the Ulster tenant right were ex- 
tended to the whole of Great Britain, it would be but to 
carve out of the estate of the landlord an estate for the 
tenant. The condition of the laborer would not be a 
whit improved. If landlords were prohibited from ask- 
ing an increase of rent from their tenants and from 
ejecting a tenant so long as the fixed rent was paid, the 
body of the producers would gain nothing. Economic 
rent would still increase, and would still steadily lessen 
the proportion of the produce going to labor and capital. 
The only difference would be that the tenants of the first 
landlords, who would become landlords in their turn, 
would profit by the increase. 

If by a restriction upon the amount of land any one 
individual might hold, by the regulation of devises and 
successions, or by cumulative taxation, the few thousand 
land holders of Great Britain should be increased by two 
or three million, these two or three million people would 
be gainers. But the rest of the population would gain 
nothing. They would have no more share in the ad- 
vantages of land ownership than before. And if, what 
is manifestly impossible, a, fair distribution of the land 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 323 

were made among the whole population, giving to each 
his equal share, and laws enacted which would interpose 
a barrier to the tendency to concentration by forbidding 
the holding by any one of more than the fixed amount, 
what would become of the increase of population? 

Just what may be accomplished by the greater division 
of land may be seen in those districts of France and 
Belgium where minute division prevails. That such a 
division of land is on the whole much better, and that it 
gives a far more stable basis to the state than that which 
prevails in England, there can be no doubt. But that it 
does not make wages any higher or improve the condi- 
tion of the class who have only their labor, is equally 
clear. These French and Belgian peasants practice a 
rigid economy unknown to any of the English-speaking 
peoples. And if such striking symptoms of the poverty 
and distress of the lowest class are not apparent as on 
the other side of the channel, it must, I think, be at- 
tributed, not only to this fact, but to another fact, which 
accounts for the continuance of the minute division of 
the land — that material progress has not been so rapid. 

Neither has population increased with the same rapid- 
ity (on the contrary it has been nearly stationary), nor 
have improvements in the modes of production been so 
great. Nevertheless, M. de Laveleye, all of whose pre- 
possessions are in favor of small holdings, and whose 
testimony will therefore carry more weight than that of 
English observers, who may be supposed to harbor a 
prejudice for the system of their own country, states in 
his paper on the Land Systems of Belgium and Holland, 
printed by the Cobden Club, that the condition of the 
laborer is worse under this system of the minute division 
of land than it is in England; while the tenant farmers 
— for tenancy largely prevails even where the morcell- 
ment is greatest — are rack-rented with a mercilessness 
unknown in England, and even in 'Ireland, and the 



324 THE REMEDY. Book VI. 

franchise "so far from raising them in the social scale, 
is but a source of mortification and humiliation to them, 
for they are forced to vote according to the dictates of 
the landlord instead of following the dictates of their 
own inclination and convictions. " 

But while the subdivision of land can thus do nothing 
to cure the evils of land monopoly, while it can have no 
effect in raising wages or in improving the condition of 
the lowest classes, its tendency is to prevent the adop- 
tion or even advocacy of more thorough-going measures, 
and to strengthen the existing unjust system by interest- 
ing a larger number in its maintenance, M. de Laveleye, 
in concluding the paper from which I have quoted, 
urges the greater division of land as the surest means of 
securing the great land owners of England from some- 
thing far more radical. Although in the districts where 
land is so minutely divided, the condition of the laborer 
is, he states, the worst in Europe and the renting 
farmer is much more ground down by his landlord than 
the Irish tenant, yet "feelings hostile to social order," 
M. de Laveleye goes on to say, "do not manifest them- 
selves," because — 

"The tenant, although ground down by the constant rise of rents, 
lives among his equals, peasants like himself who have tenants whom 
they use just as the large land holder does his. His father, his 
brother, perhaps the man himself, possesses something like an acre 
of land, which he lets at as high a rent as he can get. In the public 
house peasant proprietors will boast of the high rents they get for 
their lands, just as they might boast of having sold their pigs or po- 
tatoes very dear. Letting at as high a rent as possible comes thus to 
seem to him to be quite a matter of course, and he never dreams of 
finding fault with either the land owners as a class or with property 
in land. His mind is not likely to dwell on the notion of a caste of 
domineering landlords, of "bloodthirsty tyrants, " fattening on the 
sweat of impoverished tenants and doing no work themselves; for 
those who drive the hardest bargains are not the great land owners 
but his own fellows. Thus, the distribution of a number of small 
properties among the peasantry forms a kind of rampart and saf^r 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF PROPOSED REMEDIES. 325 

guard for the holders of large estates, and peasant property may 
without exaggeration be called the lightning conductor that averts 
from society dangers which might otherwise lead to violent catas- 
trophes. 

"The concentration of land in large estates among a small num- 
ber of families is a sort of provocation of leveling legislation. The 
position of England, so enviable in many respects, seems to me to be 
in this respect full of danger for the future." 

To me, for the very same reason that M. de Laveleye 
expresses, the position of England seems full of hope. 

Let us abandon all attempt to get rid of the evils of 
land monopoly by restricting land ownership. An equal 
distribution of land is impossible, and anything short of 
that would be only a mitigation, not a cure, and a mitiga- 
tion that would prevent the adoption of a cure. Nor is 
any remedy worth considering that does not fall in with 
the natural direction of social development, and swim, 
so to speak, with the current of the times. That con- 
centration is the order of development there can be no 
mistaking — the concentration of people in large cities, 
the concentration of handicrafts in large factories, the 
concentration of transportation by railroad and steam- 
ship lines, and of agricultural operations in large fields. 
The most trivial businesses are being concentrated in the 
same way — errands are run and carpet sacks are carried 
by corporations. All the currents of the time run to 
concentration. To resist it successfully we must throt- 
tle steam and discharge electricity from human service. 



CHAPTEK II. 

THE TRUE REMEDY. 

We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth 
which is the curse and menace of modern civilization to 
the institution of private property in land. We have 
seen that so long as this institution exists no increase in 
productive power can permanently benefit the masses; 
but, on the contrary, must tend still further to depress 
their condition. We have examined all the remedies, 
short of the abolition of private property in land, which 
are currently relied on or proposed for the relief of pov- 
erty and the better distribution of wealth, and have 
found them all inefficacious or impracticable. 

There is but one way to remove an evil — and that is, 
to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth in- 
creases, and wages are forced down while productive 
power grows, because land, which is the source of all 
wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To ex- 
tirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands 
they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must 
therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land 
a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the 
cause of the evil — in nothing else is there the slightest 
hope. 

This, then, is the remedy for the unjust and unequal 
distribution of wealth apparent in modern civilization, 
and for all the evils which flow from it: 

We must make land common property. 

We have reached this conclusion by an examination in 



Chap. II. THE TRUE REMEDY. 327 

which every step has been proved and secured. In the 
chain of reasoning no link is wanting and no link is 
weak. Deduction and induction have brought us to the 
same truth — that the unequal ownership of land neces- 
sitates the unequal distribution of wealth. And as in 
the nature of things unequal ownership of land is in- 
separable from the recognition of individual property in 
land, it necessarily follows that the only remedy for the 
unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common 
property. 

But this is a truth which, in the present state of so- 
ciety, will arouse the most bitter antagonism, and must 
fight its way, inch by inch. It will be necessary, there- 
fore, to meet the objections of those who, even when 
driven to admit this truth, will declare that it cannot be 
practically applied. 

In doing this we shall bring our previous reasoning to 
a new and crucial test. Just as we try addition by sub- 
u .otion and multiplication by division, so may we, by 
testing the sufficiency of the remedy, prove the correct- 
ness of our conclusions as to the cause of the evil. 

The laws of the universe are harmonious. And if the 
remedy to which we have been led is the true one, it 
must be consistent with justice; it must be practicable 
of application; it must accord with the tendencies of 
social development and must harmonize with other 
reforms. 

All this I propose to show. I propose to meet all 
practical objections that can be raised, and to show that 
this simple measure is not only easy of application; but 
that it is a sufficient remedy for all the evils which, as 
modern progress goes on, arise from the greater and 
greater inequality in the distribution of wealth— that it 
will substitute equality for inequality, plenty for want, 
justice for injustice, social strength for social weakness, 
and will open the way to grander and nobler advances of 
civilization. 



328 THE REMEDY. Book VI. 

I thus propose to show that the laws of the universe do 
not deny the natural aspirations of the human heart; 
that the progress of society might be, and, if it is to con- 
tinue, must be, toward equality, not toward inequality; 
and that the economic harmonies prove the truth per- 
ceived by the Stoic Emperor — 

"We are made for co-operation — like feet, like hands, 
like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth" 



BOOK VII. 

JUSTICE OF THE KEMEDY. 



CHAPTER I. — INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 

CHAPTER II. — ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTI- 
MATE RESULT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 
IN LAND. 

CHAPTER III. — CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSA- 
TION. 

CHAPTER IV. — PROPERTY IN LAND HISTORICALLY CON- 
SIDERED. 

CHAPTER V. — PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED 

STATES. 



Justice is a relation of congruity which really subsists between 
two things. This relation is always the same, whatever being con- 
siders it, whether it be God, or an angel, or lastly a man. — Montesquieu, 



CHAPTER I. 

THE INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 

When it is proposed to abolish private property in land 
the first question that will arise is that of justice. 
Though often warped by habit, superstition, and self- 
ishness into the most distorted forms, the sentiment of 
justice is yet fundamental .to the human mind, and 
whatever dispute arouses the passions of men, the con- 
flict is sure to rage, not so much as to the question "Is it 
wise?" as to the question "Is it right?" 

This tendency of popular discussions to take an ethical 
form has a cause. It springs from a law of the human 
mind; it rests upon a vague and instinctive recognition 
of what is probably the deepest truth we can grasp. 
That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring 
which is right. In the narrow scale of individual actions 
and individual life this truth may be often obscured, but 
in the wider field of national life it everywhere stands 
out. 

I bow to this arbitrament, and accept this test. If 
our inquiry into the cause which makes low wages and 
pauperism the accompaniments of material progress has 
led us to a correct conclusion, it will bear translation 
from terms of political economy into terms of ethics, and 
as the source of social evils show a wrong. If it will not 
do this, it is disproved. If it will do this, it is proved 
by the final decision. If private property in land be 
just, then is the remedy I propose a false one; if, on the 
contrary, private property in land be unjust, then is this 
remedy the true one. 



332 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII 

What constitutes the rightful basis of property? What 
is it that enables a man justly to say of a thing, "It is 
mine?" From what springs the sentiment which ac- 
knowledges his exclusive right as against all the world? 
Is it not, primarily, the right of a man to himself to the 
use of his own powers, to the enjoyment of the fruits of 
his own exertions? Is it not this individual right, which 
springs from and is testified to by the natural facts of in- 
dividual organization — the fact that each particular pair 
of hands obey a particular brain and are related to a par- 
ticular stomach; the fact that each man is a definite, 
coherent, independent whole — which alone justifies indi- 
vidual ownership? As a man belongs to himself, so his 
labor when put in concrete form belongs to him. 

And for this reason, that which a man makes or pro- 
duces is his own. as against all the world — to enjoy or to 
destroy, to use, to exchange, or to give. No one else 
can rightfully claim it, and his exclusive right to it in- 
volves no wrong to any one else. Thus there is to every- 
thing produced by human exertion a clear and indis- 
putable title to exclusive possession and enjoyment, 
which is perfectly consistent with justice, as it descends 
from the original producer, in whom it vested by natural 
law. The pen with which I am writing is justly mine. 
No other human being can rightfully lay claim to it, for 
in me is the title of the producers who made it. It has 
become mine, because transferred to me by the stationer, 
to whom it was transferred by the importer, who ob- 
tained the exclusive right to it by transfer from the man- 
ufacturer, in whom, by the same process of purchase, 
vested the rights of those who dug the material from 
the ground and shaped it into a pen. Thus, my ex- 
clusive right of ownership in the pen springs from the 
natural right of the individual to the use of his own 
faculties. 

Now, this is not only the original source from which 



Chap. I. INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 333 

all ideas of exclusive ownership arise — as is evident from 
the natural tendency of the mind to revert to it when 
the idea of exclusive ownership is questioned, and the 
manner in which social relations develop — but it is neces- 
sarily the only source. There can be to the ownership 
of anything no rightful title which is not derived from 
the title of the producer and does not rest upon the 
natural right of the man to himself. There can be no 
other rightful title, because (1st) there is no other 
natural right from which any other title can be derived, 
and (2d) because the recognition of any other title is in- 
consistent with and destructive of this. 

For (1st) what other right exists from which the right 
to the exclusive possession of anything can be derived, 
save the right of a man to himself? With what other 
power is man by nature clothed, save the power of exert- 
ing his own faculties? How can he in any other way act 
upon or affect material things or other men? Paralyze 
the motor nerves, and your man has no more external 
influence or power than a log or stone. From what else, 
then, can the right of possessing and controlling things 
be derived? If it spring not from man himself, from 
what can it spring? Nature acknowledges no ownership 
or control in man save as the result of exertion. In no 
other way can her treasures be drawn forth, her powers 
directed, or her forces utilized or controlled. She makes 
no discriminations among men, but is to all absolutely 
impartial. She knows no distinction between master 
and slave, king and subject, saint and sinner. All men 
to her stand upon an equal footing and have equal 
rights. She recognizes no claim but that of labor, and 
recognizes that without respect to the claimant. If a 
pirate spread his sails, the wind will fill them as well as it 
will fill those of a peaceful merchantman or missionary 
bark; if a king and a common man be thrown overboard, 
neither can keep his head above water except by swim- 



334 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII. 

ming; birds will not come to be shot by the proprietor of 
the soil any quicker than they will come to be shot by 
the poacher; fish will bite or will not bite at a hook in 
utter disregard as to whether it is offered them by a good 
little boy who goes to Sunday-school, or a bad little boy 
who plays truant; grain will grow only as the ground is 
prepared and the seed is sown; it is only at the call of 
labor that ore can be raised from the mine; the sun 
shines and the rain falls, alike upon just and unjust. 
The laws of nature are the decrees of the Creator. 
There is written in them no recognition of any right save 
that of labor; and in them is written broadly and clearly 
the equal right of all men to the use and enjoyment of 
nature; to apply to her by their exertions, and to receive 
and possess her reward. Hence, as nature gives only to 
labor, the exertion of labor in production is the only 
title to exclusive possession. 

2d. This right of ownership that springs from labor 
excludes the possibility of any other right of ownership. 
If a man be rightfully entitled to the produce of his labor, 
then no one can be rightfully entitled to the ownership 
of anything which is not the produce of his labor, or the 
labor of some one else from whom the right has passed 
to him. If production give to the producer the right to 
exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully 
be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything 
/iot the production of labor, and the recognition of pri- 
vate property in land is a wrong. For the right to the 
produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to 
the free use of the opportunities offered by nature, and 
to admit the right of property in these is to deny the 
light of property in the produce of labor. When non- 
producers can claim as rent a portion of the wealth 
created by producers, the right of the producers to the 
fruits of their labor is to that extent denied. 

There is no escape from this position. To affirm that 



Chap.l. INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY INLAND. 335 

a man can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in his 
own labor when embodied in material things, is to deny 
that any one can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in 
land. To affirm the rightfulness of property in land, is to 
affirm a claim which has no warrant in nature, as against 
a claim founded in the organization of man and the laws 
of the material universe. 

What most prevents the realization of the injustice of 
private property in land is the habit of including all the 
things that are made the subject of ownership in one 
category, as property, or, if any distinction is made, 
drawing the line, according to the unphilosophical dis- 
tinction of the lawyers, between personal property and 
real estate, or things movable and things immovable. 
The real and natural distinction is between things which 
are the produce of labor and things which are the gratu- 
itous offerings of nature; or, to adopt the terms of polit- 
ical economy, between wealth and land. 

These two classes of things are in essence and relations 
widely different, and to class them together as property 
is to confuse all thought when we come to consider the 
justice or the injustice, the right or the wrong of prop, 
erty. 

A house and the lot on which it stands are alike prop- 
erty, as being the subject of ownership, and are alike 
classed by the lawyers as real estate. Yet in nature and 
relations they differ widely. The one is produced by 
human labor, and belongs to the class in political econ- 
omy styled wealth. The other is a part of nature, and 
belongs to the class in political economy styled land. 

The essential character of the one class of things is 
that they embody labor, are brought into being by 
human exertion, their existence or non-existence, their 
increase or diminution, depending on man. The essential 
character of the other class of things is that they do not 
embody labor, and exist irrespective of human exertion 



336 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII. 

and irrespective of man; they are the field or environ- 
ment in which man finds himself; the storehouse from 
which his needs must be supplied, the raw material upon 
which, and the forces with which alone his labor can act. 

The moment this distinction is realized, that moment 
is it seen that the sanction which natural justice gives to 
one species of property is denied to the other; that the 
rightfulness which attaches to individual porperty in the 
produce of labor implies the wrongfulness of individual 
property in land; that, whereas the recognition of the 
one places all men upon equal terms, securing to each 
the due reward of his labor, the recognition of the other 
is the denial of the equal rights of men, permitting those 
who do not labor to take the natural reward of those 
who do. 

Whatever may be said for the institution of private 
property in land, it is therefore plain that it cannot be 
defended on the score of justice. 

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as 
clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right 
proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot 
suppose that some men have a right to be in this world 
and others no right. 

If we are all here by the equal permission of the Crea- 
tor, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment 
of his bounty — with an equal right to the use of all that 
nature so impartially offers.* This is a right which is 

* In saying that private property in land can, in the ultimate an- 
alysis, be justified only on the theory that some men have a better 
right to existence than others, I am stating only what the advocates 
of the existing system have themselves perceived. What gave to 
Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes — what caused his 
illogical book to be received as a new revelation, induced sovereigns 
to send him decorations, and the meanest rich man in England to 
propose to give him a living, was the fact that he furnished a plaus- 



Cha}x J. INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 337 

natural and inalienable; it is a right which vests in every 
human being as he enters the world, and which during 
his continuance in the world can be limited only by the 
equal rights of others. There is in nature no such thing 
as a fee simple in land. There is on earth no power 
which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive owner- 
ship in land. If all existing men were to unite to grant 
away their equal rights, they could not grant away the 
right of those who follow them. For what are we but 
tenants for a day? Have we made the earth, that we 
should determine the rights of those who after us shall 
tenant it in their turn? The Almighty, who created the 
earth for man and man for the earth, has entailed it upon 
all the generations of the children of men by a decree 
written upon the constitution of all things — a decree 
which no human action can bar and no prescription de- 
termine. Let the parchments be ever so many, or pos- 
session ever so long, natural justice can recognize no 
right in one man to the possession and enjoyment of land 
that is not equally the right of all his fellows. Though 
his titles have been acquiesced in by generation after 
generation, to the landed estates of the Duke of West- 
minster the poorest child that is born in London to-day 

ible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to ex- 
istence than others — an assumption which is necessary for the justi- 
fication of private property in land, and which Malthus clearly states 
in the declaration that the tendency of population is constantly to 
bring into the world human beings for whom nature refuses to pro- 
vide, and who consequently ' '' have not the slightest right to any share 
in the existing store of the necessaries of life;" whom she tells as in- 
terlopers to begone, "and does not hesitate to extort by force obedi- 
ence to her mandates," employing for that purpose "hunger and 
pestilence, war and crime, mortality and neglect of infantine life, 
prostitution and syphilis." And to-day this Malthusian doctrine is 
the ultimate defense upon which those who justify private property 
in land fall back. In no other way can it be logically defended. 



338 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII. 

has as much right as has his eldest son.* Though the 
sovereign people of the State of New York consent to the 
landed possessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that 
comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of 
the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that mo- 
ment seized of an equal right with the millionaires. And 
it is robbed if the right is denied. 

Our previous conclusions, irresistible in themselves, 
thus stand approved by the highest and final test. 
Translated from terms of political economy into terms of 
ethics they show a wrong as the source of the evils which 
increase as material progress goes on. 

The masses of men, who in the midst of abundance 
suffer want; who, clothed with political freedom, are con- 
demned to the wages of slavery; to whose toil labor-saving 
inventions bring no relief, but rather seem to rob them 
of a privilege, instinctively feel that "there is something 
wrong. " And they are right. 

The wide-spreading social evils which everywhere op- 
press men amid an advancing civilization spring from a 
great primary wrong — the appropriation, as the exclusive 
property of some men, of the land on which and from 
which all must live. From this fundamental injustice 
flow all the injustices which distort and endanger modern 
development, which condemn the producer of wealth to 

* This natural and inalienable right to the equal use and enjoy- 
ment of land is so apparent that it has been recognized by men 
wherever force or habit has not blunted first perceptions. To give 
but one instance: The white settlers of New Zealand found them- 
selves unable to get from the Maoris what the latter considered a 
complete title to land, because, although a whole tribe might have 
consented to a sale, they would still claim with every new child born 
among them an additional payment on the ground that they had 
parted with only their own rights, and could not sell those of the un- 
born. The government was obliged to step in and settle the matter 
by buying land for a tribal annuity, in which every child that is born 
acquires a share. 



Chap. L INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND, 339 

poverty and pamper the non-producer in luxury, which 
rear the tenement house with the palace, plant the 
brothel behind the church, and compel us to build pris- 
ons as we open new schools. 

There is nothing strange or inexplicable in the phe- 
nomena that are now perplexing the world. It is not 
that material progress is not in itself a good ; it is not 
that nature has called into being children for whom she 
has failed to provide; it is not that the Creator has left 
on natural laws a taint of injustice at which even the 
human mind revolts, that material progress brings such 
bitter fruits. That amid our highest civilization men 
faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of 
nature, but to the injustice of man. Vice and misery, 
poverty and pauperism, are not the legitimate results of 
increase of population and industrial development ; they 
only follow increase of population and industrial develop- 
ment because land is treated as private property — they 
are the direct and necessary results of the violation of 
the supreme law of justice, involved in giving to some 
men the exclusive possession of that which nature pro- 
vides for all men. 

The recognition of individual proprietorship of land is 
the denial of the natural rights of other individuals — it is 
a wrong which must show itself in the inequitable divi- 
sion of wealth. For as labor cannot produce without the 
use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of 
land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its 
own produce. If one man can command the land upon 
which others must labor, he can appropriate the produce 
of their labor as the price of his permission to labor. 
The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment by 
man shall be consequent upon his exertion, is thus vio- 
latedc The one receives without producing; the others 
produce without receiving. The one is unjustly enriched; 
the others are robbed. To this fundamental wrong we 



340 JUSTICE OF THE KEMEDY. Book Vll 

have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is 
separating modern society into the very rich and the very 
poor. It is the continuous increase of rent — the price 
that labor is compelled to pay for the use of land, which 
strips the many of the wealth they justly earn, to pile it 
up in the hands of the few, who do nothing to earn it. 

Why should they who suffer from this injustice hesi- 
tate for one moment to sweep it away? Who are the land 
holders that they should thus be permitted to reap 
where they have not sown? 

Consider for a moment the utter asburdity of the titles 
by which we permit to be gravely passed from John Doe 
to Richard Eoe the right exclusively to possess the earth, 
giving absolute dominion as against all others. In Cali- 
fornia our land titles go back to the Supreme Government 
of Mexico, who took from the Spanish King, who took 
from the Pope, when he by a stroke of the pen divided 
lands yet to be discovered between the Spanish or Por- 
tuguese — or if you please they rest upon conquest. In 
the Eastern States they go back to treaties with Indians 
and grants from English Kings; in Louisiana to the Gov- 
ernment of France; in Florida to the Government of 
Spain; while in England they go back to the Norman 
conquerors. Everywhere, not to a right which obliges, 
but to a force which compels. And when a title rests 
but on force, no complaint can be made when force an- 
nuls it. Whenever the people, having the power, choose 
to annul those titles, no objection can be made in the 
name of justice. There have existed men who had the 
power to hold or to give exclusive possession of portions 
of the earth's surface, but when and where did there 
exist the human being who had the right? 

The right to exclusive ownership of anything of human 
production is clear. No matter how many the hands 
through which it has passed, there was, at the beginning 
of the line, human labor — some one who, having procured 



Chap. I. INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IX LAXD. 34i 

or produced it by his exertions, had to it a clear title as 
against all the rest of mankind, and which could justly 
pass from one to another by sale or gift. But at the end 
of what string of conveyances or grants can be shown or 
supposed a like title to any part of the material universe? 
To improvements such an original title can be shown; 
but it is a title only to the improvements, and not to the 
land itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or fill a 
morass, all I can justly claim is the value given by these 
exertions. They give me no right to the land itself, no 
claim other than to my equal share with every other 
member of the community in the value which is added to 
it by the growth of the community. 

But it will be said: There are improvements which in 
time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very 
well; then the title to the improvements becomes blended 
with the title to the land; the individual right is lost in 
the common right. It is the greater that swallows up 
the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Na- 
ture does not proceed from man, but man from nature, 
and it is into the bosom of nature that he and all his 
works must return again. 

Yet, it will be said: As every man has a right to the 
use and enjoyment of nature, the man who is using land 
must be permitted the exclusive right to its use in order 
that he may get the full benefit of his labor. But there 
is no difficulty in determining where the individual right 
ends and the common right begins. - A delicate and ex- 
act test is supplied by value, and with its aid there is no 
difficulty, no matter how dense population may become, 
in determining and securing the exact rights of each, the 
equal rights of all. The value of land, as we have seen, 
is the price of monopoly. It is not the absolute, but the 
relative, capability of land that determines its value. No 
matter what may be its intrinsic qualities, land that is no 
better than other land which may be had for the using 



342 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book Vll 

can have no value. And the value of land always meas- 
ures the difference between it and the best land that may 
be had for the using. Thus, the value of land expresses 
in exact and tangible form the right of the community in 
land held by an individual; and rent expresses the exact 
amount which the individual should pay to the commu- 
nity to satisfy the equal rights of all other members of 
the community. Thus, if we concede to priority of pos- 
session the undisturbed use of land, confiscating rent for 
the benefit of the community, we reconcile the fixity of 
tenure which is necessary for improvement with a full 
and complete recognition of the equal rights of all to the 
use of land. 

As for the deduction of a complete and exclusive indi- 
vidual right to land from priority of occupation, that is, 
if possible, the most absurd ground on which land owner- 
ship can be defended. Priority of occupation give exclu- 
sive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe on 
which, in the order of nature, countless generations suc- 
ceed each other! Had the men of the last generation 
any better right to the use of this world than we of this? 
or the men of a hundred years ago? or of a thousand 
years ago? Had the mound-builders, or the cave-dwell- 
ers, the contemporaries of the mastodon and the three- 
toed horse, or the generations still further back, who, in 
dim aeons that we can think of only as geologic periods, 
followed each other on the earth we now tenant for our 
little day? 

Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back 
all the chairs and claim that none of the other guests 
shall partake of the food provided, except as they mak& 
terms with him? Does the first man who presents a 
ticket at the door of a theater, and passes in, acquire by 
his priority the right to shut the doors and have the per- 
formance go on for him alone? Does the first passenger 
who enters a railroad car obtain the right to scatter his 



Chap. T. INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 343 

baggage over all the seats and compel the passengers who 
come in after him to stand up? 

The cases are perfectly analogous. We arrive and we 
depart, guests at a banquet continually spread, specta- 
tors and participants in an entertainment where there is 
room for all who come; passengers from station to sta- 
tion, on an orb that whirls through space — our rights o 
take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be 
bounded everywhere by the equal rights of others. Just 
as the passenger in a railroad car may spread himself 
and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases, until 
other passengers come in, so may a settler take and use 
as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others — 
a fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value — when 
his right must be curtailed by the equal rights of the 
others, and no priority of appropriation can give a right 
which will bar these equal rights of others. If this were 
not the case, then by priority of appropriation one man 
could acquire and could transmit to whom he pleased, 
not merely the exclusive right to 160 acres, or to 640 
acres, but to a whole township, a whole State, a whole 
continent. 

And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of 
individual right to land come when carried to its ultimate 
— that any one human being, could he concentrate in 
himself the individual rights to the land of any country, 
could expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants; and 
could he thus concentrate the individual rights to the 
whole surface of the globe, he alone of all the teeming 
population of the earth would have the right to live. 

And what upon this supposition would occur is, upon a 
smaller scale, realized in actual fact. The territorial 
lords of Great Britain, to whom grants of land have given 
the "white parasols and elephants mad with pride, " have 
over and over again expelled from large districts the na- 
tive population,, whose ancestors had lived on the land 



344 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIL 

from immemorial times — driven them off to emigrate, to 
become paupers, or to starve. And on uncultivated 
tracts of land in the nt w State of California may be seen the 
blackened chimneys of homes from which settlers have 
been driven by force of laws which ignore natural right, 
and great stretches of land which might be populous are 
desolate, because the recognition of exclusive ownership 
has put it in the power of one human creature to forbid 
his fellows from using it. The comparative handful of 
proprietors who own the surface of the British Islands 
would be doing only what English law gives them full 
power to do, and what many of them have done on a 
smaller scale already, were they to exclude the millions 
of British people from their native islands. And such 
an exclusion, by which a few hundred thousand should 
at will banish thirty million people from their native 
country, while it would be more striking, would not be a 
whit more repugnant to natural right than the spectacle 
now presented, of the vast body of the British people be- 
ing compelled to pay such enormous sums to a few of 
their number for the privilege of being permitted to live 
upon and use the land which they so fondly call their 
own; which is endeared to them by memories so tender 
and so glorious, and for which they are held in duty 
bound, if need be, to spill their blood and lay down their 
lives. 

I refer only t^ the British Islands, because, land own- 
ership being more concentrated there, they afford a more 
striking illustation of what private property in land nec- 
essarily involves. "To whomsoever the soil at any time 
belongs, to him belong the fruits of it," is a truth that 
becomes more and more apparent as population becomes 
denser and invention and improvement add to produc- 
tive power; but it is everywhere a truth — as much in our 
new States as in the British Islands or by the banks of 
the Indus. 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTIMATE RESULT: 
OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. 

If chattel slavery be unjust, then is private property in 
land unjust. 

For let the circumstances be what they may — the own- 
ership of land will always give the ownership of men, to 
a degree measured by the necessity (real or artificial) for 
the use of land. This is but a statement in different 
form of the law of rent. 

And when that necessity is absolute — when starvation 
is the alternative to the use of land, then does the own- 
ership of men involved in the ownership of land become 
absolute. 

Place one hundred men on an island from which there 
is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the 
absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute 
owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference 
either to him or to them. 

In the one case, as the other, the one will be the abso- 
lute master of the ninety-nine — his power extending even 
to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission to 
live upon the island would be to force them into the sea. 

Upon a larger scale, and through more complex rela- 
tions, the same cause must operate in the same way and 
to the same end — the ultimate result, the enslavement of 
laborers, becoming apparent just as the pressure increases 
which compels them to live on and from land which is 
treated as the exclusive property of others. Take a 
country in which the soil is divided among a number of 



346 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book Vll 

proprietors, instead of being in the hands of one, and in 
which, as in modern production, the capitalist has been 
specialized from the laborer, and manufactures and ex- 
change, in all their many branches, have been separated 
from agriculture. Though less direct and obvious, the 
relations between the owners of the soil and the laborers 
will, with increase of population and the improvement of 
the arts, tend to the same absolute mastery on the one 
hand and the same abject helplessness on the other, as in 
the case of the island we have supposed. Eent will ad- 
vance, while wages will fall. Of the aggregate produce, 
the land owner will get a constantly increasing, the 
laborer a constantly diminishing share. Just as removal 
to cheaper land becomes difficult or impossible, laborers, 
no matter what they produce, will be reduced to a bare 
living, and the free competition among them, where land 
is monopolized, will force them to a condition which, 
though they may be mocked with the titles and insignia 
of freedom, will be virtually that of slavery. 

There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of 
the enormous increase in productive power which this 
century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the 
wages of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry 
should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery — just 
enough to keep the laborer in working condition. For 
the ownership of the land on which and from which a 
man must live is virtually the ownership of the man 
himself, and in acknowledging the right of some individ- 
uals to the exclusive use and enjoyment of the earth, we 
condemn other individuals to slavery as fully and as com- 
pletely as though we had formally made them chattels. 

In a simpler form of society, where production chiefly 
consists in the direct application of labor to the soil, the 
slavery that is the necessary result of according to some 
the exclusive right to the soil from which all must live, 
is plainly seen in helotism, in villeinage, in serfdom. 



Chap II. ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS. 347 

Chattel slavery originated in the capture of prisoners 
in war, and, though it has existed to some extent in 
every part of the globe, its area has been small, its effects 
trivial, as compared with the forms of slavery which have 
originated in the appropriation of land. No people as a 
mass have ever been reduced to chattel slavery to men of 
their own race, nor yet on any large scale has any people 
ever been reduced to slavery of this kind by conquest. 
The general subjection of the many to the few, which we 
meet with wherever society has reached a certain develop- 
ment, has resulted from the appropriation of land as in- 
dividual property. It is the ownership of the soil that 
everywhere gives the ownership of the men that live 
upon it. It is slavery of this kind to which the enduring 
pyramids and the colossal monuments of Egypt yet bear 
witness, and of the institution of which we have, perhaps, 
a vague tradition in the biblical story of the famine dur- 
ing which the Pharaoh purchased up the lands of the 
people. It was slavery of this kind to which, in the 
twilight of history, the conquerors of Greece reduced the 
original inhabitants of that peninsula, transforming them 
into helots by making them pay rent for their lands. It 
was the growth of the latifundia, or great landed estates, 
which transmuted the population of ancient Italy, from 
a race of hardy husbandmen, whose robust virtues con- 
quered the world, into a race of cringing bondsmen; it 
was the appropriation of the land as the absolute prop- 
erty of their chieftains which gradually turned the de- 
scendants of free and equal Gallic, Teutonic and Hunnish 
warriors into colonii and villains, and which changed the 
independent burghers of Sclavonic village communities 
into the boors of Eussia and the serfs of Poland; which 
instituted the feudalism of China and Japan, as well as 
that of Europe, and which made the High Chiefs of 
Polynesia the all but absolute masters of their fellows. 
How it came to pass that the Aryan shepherds and warriors 



348 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY, Book VII 

who, as comparative philology tells us, descended from the 
common birthplace of the Indo-Germanic race into the 
lowlands of India, were turned into the suppliant and 
cringing Hindoo, the Sanscrit verse which I have before 
quoted gives us a hint. The white parasols and the ele- 
phants mad with pride of the Indian Rajah are the flow- 
ers of grants of land. And could we find the key to the 
records of the long-buried civilizations that lie entombed 
in the gigantic ruins of Yucatan and Guatemala, telling 
at once of the pride of a ruling class and the unrequited 
toil to which the masses were condemned, we should read, 
in all human probability, of a slavery imposed upon the 
great body of the people through the appropriation of 
the land as the property of a few — of another illustration 
of the universal truth that they who possess the land are 
masters of the men who dwell upon it. 

The necessary relation between labor and land, the ab- 
solute power which the ownership of land gives over men 
who cannot live but by using it, explains what is other- 
wise inexplicable — the growth and persistence of institu- 
tions, manners, and ideas so utterly repugnant to the 
natural sense of liberty and equality. 

When the idea of individual ownership, which so justly 
and naturally attaches to things of human production, is 
extended to land, all the rest is a mere matter of develop- 
ment. The strongest and most cunning easily acquire a 
superior share in this species of property, which is to be 
had, not by production, but by appropriation, and in be- 
coming lords of the land they become necessarily lords of 
their fellow-men. The ownership of land is the basis of 
aristocracy. It was not nobility that gave land, but the 
possession of land that gave nobility. All the enormous 
privileges of the nobility of medieval Europe flowed from 
their position as the owners of the soil. The simple 
principle of the ownership of the soil produced, on the 
one side, the lord, on the other, the vassal — the on.e hav- 



Chap. II. ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS. 349 

ing all rights, the other none. The right of the lord to 
the soil acknowledged and maintained, those who lived 
upon it could do so only upon his terms. The manners 
and conditions of the times made those terms include 
services and servitudes, as well as rents in produce or 
money, but the essential thing that compelled them was 
the ownership of land. This power exists wherever the 
ownership of land exists, and can be brought out wher- 
ever the competition for the use of land is great enough 
to enable the landlord to make his own terms. The 
English land owner of to-day has, in the law which rec- 
ognizes his exclusive right to the land, essentially all the 
power which his predecessor the feudal baron had. He 
might command rent in services or servitudes. He might 
compel his tenants to dress themselves in a particular way, 
to profess a particular religion, to send their children to a 
particular school, to submit their differences to his decision, 
to fall upon their knees when he spoke to them, to follow 
him around dressed in his livery, or to sacrifice to him 
female honor, if they would prefer these things to being 
driven off his land. He could demand, in short, any terms 
on which men would still consent to live on his land, and 
the law could not prevent him so long as it did not qual- 
ify his ownership, for compliance with them would as- 
sume the form of a free contract or voluntary act. And 
English landlords do exercise such of these powers as in 
the manners of the times they care to. Having shaken 
off the obligation of providing for the defense of the 
country, they no longer need the military service of their 
tenants, and the possession of wealth and power being 
now shown in other ways than by long trains of attend- 
ants, they no longer care for personal service. But they 
habitually control the votes oi their tenants, and dictate 
to them in many little ways. That "right reverend 
father in God," Bishop Lord Plunkett, evicted a num- 
ber of his poor Irish tenants because they would not send 



350 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII 

their children to Protestant Sunday-schools; and to that 
Earl of Leitrim for whom Nemesis tarried so long before 
she sped the bullet of an assassin, even darker crimes are 
imputed; while, at the cold promptings of greed, cottage 
after cottage has been pulled down and family after 
family forced into the roads. The principle that permits 
this is the same principle that in ruder times and a sim- 
pler social state enthralled the great masses of the com- 
mon people and placed such a wide gulf between noble 
and peasant. Where the peasant was made a serf, it was 
simply by forbidding him to leave the estate on which he 
was born, thus artificially producing the condition we 
supposed on the island. In sparsely settled countries 
this is necessary to produce absolute slavery, but where 
land is fully occupied, competition may produce substan- 
tially the same conditions. Between the condition of the 
rack-rented Irish peasant and the Eussian serf, the ad- 
vantage was in many things on the side of the serf. The 
serf did not starve. 

Now, as I think I have conclusively proved, it is the 
same cause which has in every age degraded and enslaved 
the laboring masses^ that is working in the civilized 
world to-day. Personal liberty — that is to say, the lib- 
erty to move about — is everywhere conceded, while of 
political and legal inequality there are in the United 
States no vestiges, and in the most backward civilized 
countries but few. But the great cause of inequality re- 
mains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal distribu- 
tion of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes 
from the laborer all he produces save enough to support 
an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of 
free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. 
Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent 
steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the 
gain. 



Dhap.II. ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS. 351 

Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized 
country is, or is tending to become, that of virtual slav- 
ery under the forms of freedom. And it is probable that 
of all kinds of slavery this is the most cruel and relent- 
less. For the laborer is robbed of the produce of his 
labor and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence; but 
his taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the 
form of imperious necessities. Those to whom his labor 
is rendered and from whom his wages are received are 
often driven in their turn — contact between the laborers 
and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered, 
and individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of 
master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a soften- 
ing influence upon the great majority of men, does not 
arise; it is not one human being who seems to drive 
another to unremitting and ill-requited toil, but "the 
inevitable laws of supply and demand," for which no one 
in particular is responsible. The maxims of Oato the 
Censor — maxims which were regarded with abhorrence 
even in an age of cruelty and universal slaveholding — 
that after as much work as possible is obtained from a 
slave he should be turned out to die, become the common 
rule; and even the selfish interest which prompts the 
master to look after the comfort and well-being of the 
slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the 
laborer a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no 
owners and owned, but only buyers and sellers. The 
higgling of the market takes the place of every other 
sentiment. 

When the slaveholders of the South looked upon the 
condition of the free laboring poor in the most advanced 
civilized countries, it is no wonder that they easily per- 
suaded themselves of the divine institution of slavery. 
That the field hands of the South were as a class better 
fed, better lodged, better clothed; that they had less anxi- 



352 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII 

ety and more of the amusements and enjoyments of life 
than the agricultural laborers of England there can be 
no doubt; and even in the Northern cities, visiting slave- 
holders might see and hear of things impossible under 
what they called their organization of labor. In the 
Southern States, during the days of slavery, the master 
who would have compelled his negroes to work and live 
as large classes of free white men and women are com- 
pelled in free countries to work and live, would have been 
deemed infamous, and if public opinion had not restrained 
him, his own selfish interest in the maintenance of the 
health and strength of his chattels would. But in Lon- 
don, New York, and Boston, among people who have given, 
and would give again, money and blood to free the slave, 
where no one could abuse a beast in public without arrest 
and punishment, barefooted and ragged children may be 
seen running around the streets even in the winter time, 
and in squalid garrets and noisome cellars women work 
away their lives for wages that fail to keep them in proper 
warmth and nourishment. Is it any wonder that to the 
slaveholders of the South the demand for the abolition 
of slavery seemed like the cant of hypocrisy? 

And now that slavery has been abolished, the planters 
of the South find they have sustained no loss. Their 
ownership of the land upon which the freedmen must 
live gives them practically as much command of labor as 
before, while they are relieved of responsibility, sometimes 
very expensive. The negroes as yet have the alternative 
of emigrating, and a great movement of that kind seems 
now about commencing, but as population increases and 
land becomes dear, the planters will get a greater propor- 
tionate share of the earnings of their laborers than they 
did under the system of chattel slavery, and the laborers 
a less share — for under the system of chattel slavery the 
slaves always got at least enough to keep them in good 



Chap. II. ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS, 353 

physical health, but in such countries as England there 
are large classes of laborers who do not get that.* 

The influences which, wherever there is personal rela- 
tion between master and slave, slip in to modify chattel 
slavery, and to prevent the master from exerting to its 
fullest extent his power over the slave, also showed them- 
selves in the ruder forms of serfdom that characterized 
the earlier periods of European development, and aided 
by religion, and, perhaps, as in chattel slavery, by the 
more enlightened but still selfish interests of the lord, 
and hardening into custom, universally fixed a limit to 
what the owner of the land could extort from the serf or 
peasant, so that the competition of men without means 
of existence bidding against each other for access to the 
means of existence, was nowhere suffered to go to its full 
length and exert its full power of deprivation and degra- 
dation. The helots of Greece, the metayers of Italy, the 
serfs of Eussia and Poland, the peasants of feudal Eu- 
rope, rendered to their landlords a fixed proportion either 
of their produce or their labor, and were not generally 
squeezed past that point. But the influences which thus 
stepped in to modify the extortive power of land owner- 
ship, and which may still be seen on English estates 
where the landlord and his family deem it their duty to 
send medicines and comforts to the sick and infirm, and 
to look after the well-being of their cottagers, just as the 
Southern planter was accustomed to look after his 
negroes, are lost in the more refined and less obvious 
form which serfdom assumes in the more complicated 
processes of modern production, which separates so 

* One of the anti-slavery agitators (Col. J. A. Collins) on a visit 
to England addressed a large audience in a Scotch manufacturing 
town, and wound up as he had been used to in the United States, 
by giving the ration which in the slave codes of some of the States 
fixed the minimum of maintenance for a slave. He quickly discov 
ered that to many of his hearers it was an anti-climax. 



354 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIZ 

widely and by so many intermediate gradations the indi- 
vidual whose labor is appropriated from him who appro- 
priates it, and makes the relations between the members 
of the two classes not direct and particular, but indirect 
and general. In modern society, competition has free 
play to force from the laborer the very utmost he can 
give, and with what terrific force it is acting may be seen 
in the condition of the lowest class in the centers of 
wealth and industry. That the condition of this lowest 
class is not yet more general, is to be attributed to the 
great extent of fertile land which has hitherto been open 
on this continent, and which has not merely afforded an 
escape for the increasing population of the older sections 
of the Union, but has greatly relieved the pressure in 
Europe — in one country, Ireland, the emigration having 
been so great as actually to reduce the population. This 
avenue of relief cannot last forever. It is already fast 
closing up, and as it closes, the pressure must become 
harder and harder. 

It is not without reason that the wise crow in the 
Eamayana, the crow Bushanda, "who has lived in every 
part of the universe and knows all events from the begin- 
nings of time/' declares that, though contempt of worldly 
advantages is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keen' 
est pain possible is inflicted by extreme poverty. The 
poverty to which in advancing civilization great masses 
of men are condemned, is not the freedom from distracv 
tion and temptation which sages have sought and philos- 
ophers have praised; it is a degrading and embruting 
slavery, that cramps the higher nature, dulls the finer 
feelings, and drives men by its pain to acts which the 
brutes would refuse. It is into this helpless, hopeless 
poverty, that crushes manhood and destroys womanhood, 
that robs even childhood of its innocence and joy, that 
the working classes are being driven by a force which acts 
upon them like a resistless and unpitying machine. The 



Chap. II. ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS. 355 

Boston collar manufacturer who pays his girls two cents 
an hour may commiserate their condition, but he, as 
they, is governed by the law of competition, and cannot 
pay more and carry on his business, for exchange is not 
governed by sentiment. And so, through all interme- 
diate gradations, up to those who receive the earnings of 
labor without return, in the rent of land, it is the inex- 
orable laws of supply and demand, a power with which 
the individual can no more quarrel or dispute than with 
the winds and the tides, that seem to press down the 
lower classes into the slavery of want. 

But in reality, the cause is that which always has and 
always must result in slavery — the monopolization by 
some of what nature has designed for all. 

Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so 
long as we recognize private property in land. Until 
that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts 
of Emancipation are in vain. So long as one man can 
claim the exclusive ownership of the land from which 
other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material 
progress goes on, must grow and deepen! 

This — and in previous chapters of this book we have 
traced the process, step by step — is what is going on in 
the civilized world to-day. Private ownership of land is 
the nether millstone. Material progress is the upper 
millstone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, 
the working classes are being ground. 



CHAPTER III. 

CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. 

The truth is, and from this truth there can be no 
escape, that there is and can be no just title to an ex- 
clusive possession of the soil, and that private property 
in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like that of 
chattel slavery. 

The majority of men in civilized communities do not 
recognize this, simply because the majority of men do 
not think. With them whatever is, is right, until its 
wrongfulness has been frequently pointed out, and in 
general they are ready to crucify whoever first attempts 
this. 

But it is impossible for any one to study political 
economy, even as at present taught, or to think at all 
upon the production and distribution of wealth, without 
seeing that property in land differs essentially from prop- 
erty in things of human production, and that it has no 
warrant in abstract justice. 

This is admitted, either expressly or tacitly, in every 
standard work on political economy, but in general merely 
by vague admission or omission. Attention is in general 
called away from the truth, as a lecturer on moral philos- 
ophy in a slave-holding community might call away at- 
tention from too close a consideration of the natural 
rights of men, and private property in land is accepted 
without comment, as an existing fact, or is assumed to 
be necessary to the proper use of land and the existence 
of the civilized state. 

The examination through which we have passed has 



Chap. III. CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. 357 

proved conclusively that private property in land cannot 
be justified on the ground of utility — that, on the con- 
trary, it is the great cause to which are to be traced the 
poverty, misery, and degradation, the social disease and 
the political weakness which are showing themselves so 
menacingly amid advancing civilization. Expediency, 
therefore, joins justice in demanding that we abolish it. 

When expediency thus joins justice in demanding that 
we abolish an institution that has no broader base or 
stronger ground than a mere municipal regulation, what 
reason can there be for hesitation? 

The consideration that seems to cause hesitation, even 
on the part of those who see clearly that land by right is 
common property, is the idea that having permitted land 
to be treated as private property for so long, we should in 
abolishing it be doing a wrong to those who have been 
suffered to base their calculations upon its permanence; 
that having permitted land to be held as rightful prop- 
erty, we should by the resumption of common rights be 
doing injustice to those who have purchased it with what 
was unquestionably their rightful property. Thus, it is 
held that if we abolish private property in land, justice 
requires that we should fully compensate those who now 
possess it, as the British Government, in abolishing the 
purchase and sale of military commissions, felt itself 
bound to compensate those who held commissions which 
they had purchased in the belief that they could sell them 
again, or as in abolishing slavery in the British West 
Indies $100,000,000 was paid the slaveholders. 

Even Herbert Spencer, who in his "Social Statics" has 
go clearly demonstrated the invalidity of every title by 
which the exclusive possession of land is claimed, gives 
countenance to this idea (though it sterns to me incon- 
sistently) by declaring that justly to estimate and liquidate 
the claims of the present landholders "who have either 
by their own acts or by the acts of their ancestors given 



358 JUSTICE OF THE KEMEDY. Book VIZ 

for their estates equivalents of honestly-earned wealth/ 5 
to be "one of the most intricate problems society will 
one day have to solve." 

It is this idea that suggests the proposition, which 
finds advocates in Great Britain, that the government 
shall purchase at its market price the individual proprie- 
torship of the land of the country, and it was this idea 
which led John Stuart Mill, although clearly perceiving 
the essential injustice of private property in land, to 
advocate, not a full resumption of the land, but only a 
resumption of accruing advantages in the future. His 
plan was that a fair and even liberal estimate should be 
made of the market value of all the land in the kingdom, 
and that future additions to that value, not due to the 
improvements of the proprietor, should be taken by the 
state. 

To say nothing of the practical difficulties which such 
cumbrous plans involve, in the extension of the functions 
of government which they would require and the corrup- 
tion they would beget, their inherent and essential defect 
lies in the impossibility of bridging over by any compro- 
mise the radical difference between wrong and right. 
Justin proportion as the interests of the land holders are 
conserved, just in that proportion must general interests 
and general rights be disregarded, and if land holders are 
to lose nothing of their special privileges, the people at 
large can gain nothing. To buy up individual property 
rights would merely be to give the land holders in another 
form a claim of the same kind and amount that their 
possession of land now gives them; it would be to raise 
for them by taxation the same proportion of the earnings 
of labor and capital that they are now enabled to appro- 
priate in rent. Their unjust advantage would be pre- 
served and the unjust disadvantage of the non-landhold- 
ers would be continued. To be sure there would be a 
g^in to the people at large when the advance of rents had 



Chap. III. CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. 359 

made the amount which the land holders would take under 
the present system greater than the interest upon the 
purchase price of the land at present rates, bat this would 
be only a future gain, and in the meanwhile there would 
not only be no relief, but the burden imposed upon labor 
and capital for the benefit of the present land holders 
would be much increased. For one of the elements in the 
present market value of land is the expectation of future 
increase of value, and thus, to buy up the lands at market 
rates and pay interest upon the purchase money would 
be to saddle producers not only with the payment of 
actual rent, but with the payment in full of speculative 
rent. Or to put it in another way: The land would be 
purchased at prices calculated upon a lower than the or- 
dinary rate of interest (for the prospective increase in 
land values always makes the market price of land much 
greater than would be the price of anything else yielding 
the same present return), and interest upon the purchase 
money would be paid at the ordinary rate. Thus, not 
only all that the land yields them now would have to be 
paid the land owners, but a considerably larger amount. 
It would be, virtually, the state taking a perpetual lease 
from the present land holders at a considerable advance 
in rent over what they now receive. For the present the 
state would merely become the agent of the land holders 
in the collection of their rents, and would have to pay 
over to them not only what they received, but considerably 
more. 

Mr. MilPs plan for nationalizing the future "unearned 
increase in the value of land," by fixing the present 
market value of all lands and appropriating to the state 
future increase in value, would not add to the injustice 
of the present distribution of wealth, but it would not 
remedy it. Further speculative advance of rent would 
cease, and in the future the people at large would gain 
the difference between the increase of rent and the 



360 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIL 

amount at which that increase was estimated in fixing 
the present value of land, in w T hich, of course, prospec- 
tive, as well as present, value is an element. But it 
would leave, for all the future, one class in possession of 
the enormous advantage over others which they now 
have. All that can be said of this plan is, that it might 
be better than nothing. 

Such inefficient and impracticable schemes may do to 
talk about, where any proposition more efficacious would 
not at present be entertained, and their discussion is a 
hopeful sign, as it shows the entrance of the thin end of 
the wedge of truth. Justice in men's mouths is cring- 
ingly humble when she first begins a protest against a 
time-honored wrong, and we of the English-speaking 
nations still wear the collar of the Saxon thrall, and have 
been educated to look upon the "vested rights" of land 
owners with all the superstitious reverence that ancient 
Egyptians looked upon the crocodile. But when the 
times are ripe for them, ideas grow, even though insig- 
nificant in their first appearance. One day, the Third 
Estate covered their heads when the king put on his hat. 
A little while thereafter, and the head of a son of St. 
Louis rolled from the scaffold. The anti-slavery move- 
ment in the United States commenced with talk of com- 
pensating owners, but when four millions of slaves were 
emancipated, the owners got no compensation, nor did 
they clamor for any. And by the time the people of any 
such country as England or the United States are suffi- 
ciently aroused to the injustice and disadvantages of indi- 
vidual ownership of land to induce them to attempt its 
nationalization, they will be sufficiently aroused to nation- 
alize it in a much more direct and easy way than by pur- 
chase. They will not trouble themselves about compen- 
sating the proprietors of land. 

Nor is it right that there should be any concern about 
the proprietors of land. That such a man as John Stuart 



Chap. III. CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. 361 

Mill should have attached so much importance to the 
compensation of land owners as to have urged the confis- 
cation merely of the future increase in rent, is explain- 
able only by his acquiescence in the current doctrines that 
wages are drawn from capital and that population con- 
stantly tends to press upon subsistence. These blinded 
him as to the full effects of the private appropriation of 
land. He saw that "the claim of the land holder is alto- 
gether subordinate to the general policy of the state/' 
and that "when private property in land is not expedi- 
ent, it is unjust/'* but, entangled in the toils of the Mal- 
thusian doctrine, he attributed, as he expressly states in 
a paragraph I have previously quoted, the want and suf- 
fering that he saw around him to "the niggardliness of 
nature, not to the injustice of man/' and thus to him the 
nationalization of land seemed comparatively a little 
thing, that could accomplish nothing toward the eradica- 
tion of pauperism and the abolition of want — ends that 
could be reached only as men learned to repress a natural 
instinct. Great as* he was and pure as he was — warm 

heart and noble mind — he vet never saw the true har- 

«/ 

mony of economic laws, nor realized how from this one 
great fundamental wrong flow want and misery, and vice 
and shame. Else he could never have written this sen- 
tence: "The land of Ireland, the land of every country, 
belongs to the people of that country. The individuals I 
called land owners have no right in morality and justice 
to anything but the rent, or compensation for its salable 
value. " 

In the name of the Prophet — figs! If the land of any 
country belong to the people of that country, what right, 
in morality and justice, have the individuals called land 
owners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, 

* Principles of Political Economy, Book I, Chap. 2, Sec. 6. 



362 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book Vll 

why in the name of morality and justice should the peo- 
ple pay its salable value for their own? 

Herbert Spencer says:* "Had we to deal with the 
parties who originally robbed the human race of its heri- 
tage, we might make short work of the matter?" Why 
not make short work of the matter anyhow? For this 
robbery is not like the robbery of a horse or a sum of 
money, that ceases with the act. It is a fresh and con- 
tinuous robbery, that goes on every day and every hour c 
It is not from the produce of the past that rent is 
drawn; it is from the produce of the present. It is a 
toll levied upon labor constantly and continuously. 
Every blow of the hammer, every stroke of the pick, 
every thrust of the shuttle, every throb of the steam 
engine, pay it tribute. It levies upon the earnings of 
the men who, deep under ground, risk their lives, and of 
those who over white surges hang to reeling masts; it 
claims the just reward of the capitaMst and the fruits of 
the inventor's patient effort; it takes little children from 
play and from school, and compels them to work before 

* Social Statics, page 142. [It may be well to say in the new re- 
print of this book (1897) that this and all other references to Herbert 
Spencer's "Social Statics" are from the edition of that book pub 
lishedbyD. Appleton & Co., New York, with his consent, from 1864 
to 1892. At that time " Social Statics " was repudiated, and a new 
edition under the name of "Social Statics, abridged and revised," has 
taken its place. From this, all that the first Social Statics had said 
in denial of property in land has been eliminated, and it of course 
contains nothing here referred to. Mr. Spencer has also been driven 
by the persistent heckling of the English single tax men, who 
insisted on asking him the questions suggested in the first Social 
Statics, to bring out a small volume, entitled "Mr. Herbert Spencer 
on the Land Question," in which are reprinted in parallel columns 
Chapter IX of Social Statics, with what he considers valid answers 
to himself as given in "Justice," 1891. This has also been reprinted 
by D. Appleton & Co., and constitutes, I think, the very funniest an- 
swer to himself ever made by a man who claimed to be a philoso- 
pher.] 



Chap. III. CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. 363 

their bones are hard or their muscles are firm; it robs the 
shivering of warmth; the hungry, of food; the sick, of 
medicine; the anxious, of peace. It debases, and em- 
brutes, and embitters. It crowds families of eight and 
ten into a single squalid room; it herds like swine agri- 
cultural gangs of boys and girls; it fills the gin palace 
and groggery with those who have no comfort in their 
homes; it makes lads who might be useful men candi- 
dates for prisons and penitentiaries; it fills brothels with 
girls who might have known the pure joy of motherhood; 
it sends greed and all evil passions prowling through so- 
ciety as a hard winter drives the wolves to the abodes of 
men; it darkens faith in the human soul, and across the 
reflection of a just and merciful Creator draws the veil of 
a hard, and blind, and cruel fate! 

It is not merely a robbery in the past; it is a robbery 
in the present — a robbery that deprives of their birth- 
right the infants that are now coming into the world! 
Why should we hesitate about making short work of such 
a system? Because I was robbed yesterday, and the day 
before, and the day before that, is it any reason that I 
should suffer myself to be rohbed to-day and to-morrow? 
any reason that I should conclude that the robber has 
acquired a vested right to rob me? 

If the land belong to the people, why continue to per- 
mit land owners to take the rent, or compensate them in 
any maimer for the loss of rent? Consider what rent is. 
It does not arise spontaneously from land; it is due to 
nothing that the land owners have done. It represents 
a value created by the whole community. Let the land 
holders have, if you please, all that the possession of the 
land would give them in the absence of the rest of the 
community. But rent, the creation of the whole com- 
munity, necessarily belongs to the whole community. 

Try the case of the land holders by the maxims of the 
common law by which the rights of man and man are de- 



364 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book Vll 

termined. The common law we are told is the perfection 
of reason, and certainly the land owners cannot complain 
of its decision, for it has been built up by and for land 
owners. Now what does the law allow to the innocent 
possessor when the land for which he paid his money is 
adjudged rightfully to belong to another? Nothing at 
all. That he purchased in good faith gives him no right 
or claim whatever. The law does not concern itself with 
the "intricate question of compensation" to the innocent 
purchaser. The law does not say, as John Stuart Mill 
says: "The land belongs to A, therefore B who has 
thought himself the owner has no right to anything but 
the rent, or compensation for its salable value." For 
that would be indeed like a famous fugitive slave case 
decision in which the Court was said to have given the 
law to the North and the nigger to the South. The law 
simply says: "The land belongs to A, let the Sheriff put 
him in possession!" It gives the innocent purchaser of 
a wrongful title no claim, it allows him no compensation. 
And not only this, it takes from him all the improve- 
ments that he has in good faith made upon the land. 
You may have paid a high price for land, making every 
exertion to see that the title is good; you may have held 
it in undisturbed possession for years without thought or 
hint of an adverse claimant; made it fruitful by your toil 
or erected upon it a costly building of greater value than 
the land itself, or a modest home in which you hope, sur- 
rounded by the fig-trees you have planted and the vines 
you have dressed, to pass your declining days; yet if 
Quirk, Gammon & Snap can mouse out a technical flaw 
in your parchments or hunt up some forgotten heir who 
never dreamed of his rights, not merely the land, but all 
your improvements, may be taken away from you. And 
not merely that. According to the common law, when 
you have surrendered the land and given up your im- 
provements, you may be called upon to account for the 



Chap. Ill CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION". 365 

profits you derived from the land during the time you 
had it. 

Now if we apply to this case of The People vs. The Land 
Owners the same maxims of justice that have been for- 
mulated by land owners into law, and are applied every day 
in English and American courts to disputes between man 
and man, we shall not only not think of giving the land 
holders any compensation for the land, but shall take ail 
the improvements and whatever else they may have as> 
well. 

But I do not propose, and I do not suppose that anj 
one else will propose, to go so far. It is sufficient if the 
people resume the ownership of the land. Let the land 
owners retain their improvements and personal property 
in secure possession. 

And in this measure of justice would be no oppression, 
no injury to any class. The great cause of the present 
unequal distribution of wealth, with the suffering, deg- 
radation, and waste that it entails, would be swept away. 
Even land holders would share in the general gain. The 
gain of even the large land holders would be a real one. 
The gain of the small land holders would be enormous. 
For in welcoming Justice, men welcome the handmaid of 
Love. Peace and Plenty follow in her train, bringing 
their good gifts, not to some, but to all. 

How true this is, we shall hereafter see. 

If in this chapter I have spoken of justice and expedi- 
ency as if justice were one thing and expediency another, 
it has been merely to meet the objections of those who so 
talk. In justice is the highest and truest expediency. 



CHAPTEK IV. 

PRIVATE PROPERTY IK LAND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED. 

What more than anything else prevents the realization 
of the essential injustice of private property in land and 
stands in the way of a candid consideration of any prop- 
osition for abolishing it, is that mental habit which 
makes anything that has long existed seem natural and 
necessary. 

We are so used to the treatment of land as individual 
property, it is so thoroughly recognized in our laws, man- 
ners, and customs, that the vast majority of people never 
think of questioning it; but look upon it as necessary to 
the use of land. They are unable to conceive, or at least 
it does not enter their heads to conceive, of society as ex- 
isting or as possible without the reduction of land to 
private possession. The first step to the cultivation or 
improvement of land seems to them to get for it a par- 
ticular owner, and a man's land is looked on by them as 
fully and as equitably his, to sell, to lease, to give, or to 
bequeath, as his house, his cattle, his goods, or his fur- 
niture. The "sacredness of property" has been preached 
so constantly and effectively, especially by those "con- 
servators of ancient barbarism," as Voltaire styled the 
lawyers, that most people look upon the private owner- 
ship of land as the very foundation of civilization, and if 
the resumption of land as common property is suggested, 
think of it at first blush either as a chimerical vagary, 
which never has and never can be realized, or as a prop- 
osition to overturn society from its base and bring about 
a reversion to barbarism* 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY Itf LAND CONSIDERED. 367 

If it were true that land had always been treated as 
private property, that would not prove the justice or 
necessity of continuing so to treat it, any more than the 
universal existence of slavery, which might once have 
been safely affirmed, would prove the justice or necessity 
of making property of human flesh and blood. 

Not long ago monarchy seemed all but universal, and 
not only the kings but the majority of their subjects 
really believed that no country could get along without a 
king. Yet, to say nothing of America, France now gets 
along without a king; the Queen Ox England and Em- 
press of India has about as much to do with governing 
her realms as the wooden figurehead of a ship has in 
determining its course, and the other crowned heads 
of Europe sit, metaphorically speaking, upon barrels of 
nitro-glycerine. 

Something over a hundred years ago, Bishop Butler, 
author of the famous Analogy, declared that "a constitu- 
tion of civil government without any religious establish- 
ment is a chimerical project of which there is no exam- 
ple." As for there being no example, he was right. No 
government at that time existed, nor would it have been 
easy to name one that ever had existed, without some 
sort of an established religion; yet in the United States 
we have since proved by the practice of a century that it 
is possible for a civil government to exist without a state 
church. 

But while, were it true, that land had always and 
everywhere been treated as private property would not 
prove that it should always be so treated, this is not true. 
On the contrary, the common right to land has every- 
where been primarily recognized, and private ownership 
has nowhere grown up save as the result of usurpation. 
The primary and persistent perceptions of mankind are 
that all have an equal right to land, and the opinion that 
private property in land is necessary to society is but an 



368 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIL 

offspring of ignorance that cannot look beyond its imme- 
diate surroundings — an idea of comparatively modern 
growth, as artificial and as baseless as that of the right 
divine of kings. 

The observations of travelers, the researches of the 
critical historians who within a recent period have done 
so much to reconstruct the forgotten records of the peo- 
ple, the investigations of such men as Sir Henry Maine, 
Emile de Laveleye, Professor Nasse of Bonn, and others, 
into the growth of institutions, prove that wherever hu- 
man society has formed, the common right of men to the 
use of the earth has been recognized, and that nowhere 
has unrestricted individual ownership been freely adopted. 
Historically, as ethically, private property in land is rob- 
bery. It nowhere springs from contract; it can nowhere 
be traced to perceptions of justice or expediency; it has 
everywhere had its birth in war and conquest, and in the 
selfish use which the cunning have made of superstition 
and law. 

Wherever we can trace the early history of society, 
whether in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in America, or in 
Polynesia, land has been considered, as the necessary re- 
lations which human life has to it would lead to its con- 
sideration — as common property, in which the rights of 
all who had admitted rights were equal. That is to say, 
that all members of the community, all citizens, as we 
should say, had equal rights to the use and enjoyment of 
the land of the community. This recognition of the 
common right to land did not prevent the full recogni- 
tion of the particular and exclusive right in things which 
are the result of labor, nor was it abandoned when the 
development of agriculture had imposed the necessity of 
recognizing exclusive possession of land in order to secure 
the exclusive enjoyment of the results of the labor ex- 
pended in cultivating it. The division of land between 
the industrial units, whether families, joint families, or 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IX LAND CONSIDERED. 369 

individuals, went only as far as was necessary for that 
purpose, pasture and forest lands being retained as com- 
mon, and equality as to agricultural land being secured, 
either by a periodical re-division, as among the Teutonic 
races, or by the prohibition of alienation, as in the law of 
Moses. 

This primary adjustment still exists, in more or less 
intact form, in the village communities of India, Russia, 
and the Sclavonic countries yet, or until recently, sub- 
jected to Turkish rule; in the mountain cantons of Swit- 
zerland; among the Kabyles in the north of Africa, and 
the Kaffirs in the south; among the native population of 
Java, and the aborigines of New Zealand — that is to say, 
wherever extraneous influences have left intact the form 
of primitive social organization. That it everywhere ex- 
isted has been within late years abundantly proved by the 
researches of many independent students and observers, 
and which are, to my knowledge, best summarized in the 
"Systems of Land Tenures in Various Countries," pub- 
lished under authority of the Oobden Club, and in M. 
Emile de Laveleye's "Primitive Property," to which I 
would refer the reader who desires to see this truth dis- 
played in detail. 

"In all primitive societies," says M. de Laveleye, as 
the result of an investigation which leaves no part of the 
world unexplored — "in all primitive societies, the soil 
was the joint property of the tribes and was subject to 
periodical distribution among all the families, so that all 
might live by their labor as nature has ordained. The 
comfort of each was thus proportioned to his energy and 
intelligence; no one, at any rate, was destitute of the 
means of subsistence, and inequality increasing from 
generation to generation was provided against." 

If M. de Laveleye be right in this conclusion, and that 
he is right there can be no doubt, how, it will be asked, 
has the reduction of land to private ownership become so 
general? 



370 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book V1L 

The causes which have operated to supplant this orig- 
inal idea of the equal right to the use of land by the idea 
of exclusive and unequal rights may, I think, be every- 
where vaguely but certainly traced. They are every- 
where the same which have led to the denial of equal 
personal rights and to the establishment of privileged 
classes. 

These causes may be summarized as the concentration 
of power in the hands of chieftains and the military 
class, consequent on a state of warfare, which enabled 
them to monopolize common lands; the effect of con- 
quest, in reducing the conquered to a state of predial 
slavery, and dividing their lands among the conquerors, 
and in disproportionate share to the chiefs; the differ- 
entiation and influence of a sacerdotal class, and the 
differentiation and influence of a class of professional 
lawyers, whose interests were served by the substitution 
of exclusive, in place of common, property in land* 
— inequality once produced always tending to greater 
inequality, by the law of attraction. 

It was the struggle between this idea of equal rights to 
the soil and the tendency to monopolize it in individual 
possession, that caused the internal conflicts of Greece 
and Eome; it was the check given to this tendency — in 
Greece by such institutions as those of Lycurgus and 
Solon, and in Eome by the Licinian Law and subsequent 
divisions of land — that gave to each their days of 
strength and glory; and it was the final triumph of this 
tendency that destroyed both. Great estates ruined 
Greece, as afterward "great estates ruined Italy/'f an( i 

* The influence of the lawyers has been very marked in Europe, 
both on the continent and in Great Britain, in destroying all vestiges 
of the ancient tenure, and substituting the idea of the Roman law, 
exclusive ownership. 

fLatifundia perdidere Italiam. — Pliny. 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IX LAND CONSIDERED. 371 

as the soil, in spite of the warnings of great legislators 
and statesmen, passed finally into the possession of a few, 
population declined, art sank, the intellect became emas- 
culate, and the race in which humanity had attained its 
most splendid development became a by-word and re- 
proach among men. 

The idea of absolute individual property in land, which 
modern civilization derived from Eome, reached its full 
development there in historic times. When the future 
mistress of the world first looms up, each citizen had his 
little homestead plot, which was inalienable, and the gen- 
eral domain — "the corn-land which was of public right" 
— was subject to common use, doubtless under regula- 
tions or customs which secured equality, as in the Teu- 
tonic mark and Swiss allmend. It was from this public 
domain constantly extended by conquest, that the patri- 
cian families succeeded in carving their great estates. 
These great estates by the power with which the great 
attracts the less, in spite of temporary checks by legal 
limitation and recurring divisions, finally crushed out all 
the small proprietors, adding their little patrimonies to 
the latifundia of the enormously rich, while they them- 
selves were forced into the slave gangs, became rent-pay- 
ing colonii, or else were driven into the freshly conquered 
foreign provinces, where land was given to the veterans 
of the legions; or to the metropolis, to swell the ranks of 
the proletariat who had nothing to sell but their votes. 

Oaesarism, soon passing into an unbridled despotism of 
the Eastern type, was the inevitable political result, and 
the empire, even while it embraced the world, became in 
reality a shell, kept from collapse only by the healthier 
life of the frontiers, where the land had been divided 
among military settlers or the primitive usages longer 
survived. But the latifundia, which had devoured the 
strength of Italy, crept steadily outward, carving the 
surface of Sicily, Africa, Spain, and Gaul into great 



372 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIL 

estates cultivated by slaves or tenants. The hardy vir- 
tues born of personal independence died out, an exhaus- 
tive agriculture impoverished the soil, and wild beasts 
supplanted men, until at length, with a strength nur- 
tured in equality, the barbarians broke through; Rome 
perished; and of a civilization once so proud nothing was 
left but ruins. 

Thus came to pass that marvelous thing, which at the 
time of Rome's grandeur would have seemed as impos- 
sible as it seems now to us that the Comanches or Flat- 
heads should conquer the United States, or the Lap- 
landers should desolate Europe. The fundamental cause 
is to be sought in the tenure of land. On the one hand, 
the denial of the common right to land had resulted in 
decay; on the other, equality gave strength. 

"Freedom," says M. de Laveleye ("Primitive Prop- 
erty," p. 116), "freedom, and, as a consequence, the 
ownership of an undivided share of the common prop- 
erty, to which the head of every family in the clan was 
equally entitled, were in the German village essential 
rights. This system of absolute equality impressed a re- 
markable character on the individual, which explains 
how small bands of barbarians made themselves masters 
of the Roman Empire, in spite of its skillful adminis- 
tration, its perfect centralization and its civil law, which 
has preserved the name of written reason." 

It was, on the other hand, that the heart was eaten out 
of that great empire. "Rome perished," says Professor 
Seeley, "from the failure of the crop of men." 

In his lectures on the "History of Civilization in Eu- 
rope," and more elaborately in his lectures on the "His- 
tory of Civilization in France," M. Guizot has vividly de- 
scribed the chaos that in Europe succeeded the fall of the 
Roman Empire — a chaos which, as he says, "carried all 
things in its bosom," and from which the structure of 
modern society was slowly evolved. It is a picture which 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IN LAND CONSIDERED. 373 

cannot be compressed into a few lines, but suffice it to 
say that the result of this infusion of rude but vigorous 
life into Romanized society was a disorganization of the 
German, as well as the Roman structure — both a blend- 
ing and an admixture of the idea of common rights in 
the soil with the idea of exclusive property, substantially 
as occurred in those provinces of the Eastern Empire sub- 
sequently overrun by the Turks. The feudal system, 
which was so readily adopted and so widely spread, was 
the result of such a blending; but underneath, and side 
by side with the feudal system, a more primitive organiza- 
tion, based on the common rights of the cultivators, took 
root or revived, and has left its traces all over Europe. 
This primitive organization, which allots equal shares of 
cultivated ground and the common use of uncultivated 
ground, and which existed in Ancient Italy as in Saxon 
England, has maintained itself beneath absolutism and 
serfdom in Russia, beneath Moslem oppression in Servia, 
and in India has been swept, but not entirely destroyed, 
by wave after wave of conquest, and century after cen- 
tury of oppression. 

The feudal system, which is not peculiar to Europe, 
but seems to be the natural result of the conquest of a 
settled country by a race among whom equality and indi- 
viduality are yet strong, clearly recognized, in theory at 
least, that the land belongs to society at large, not to the 
individual. Rude outcome of an age in which might 
stood for right as nearly as it ever can (for the idea of 
right is ineradicable from the human mind, and must in 
some shape show itself even in the association of pirates 
and robbers), the feudal system yet admitted in no one 
the uncontrolled and exclusive right to land. A fief was 
essentially a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed obliga- 
tion. The sovereign, theoretically the representative of 
the collective power and rights of the whole people, was 
in feudal view the only absolute owner of land. And 



374 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book V1L 

though land was granted to individual possession, yet in 
its possession were involved duties, by which the enjoyer 
of its revenues was supposed to render back to the com- 
monwealth an equivalent for the benefits which from the 
delegation of the common right he received. 

In the feudal scheme the crown lands supported public 
expenditures which are now included in the civil list; the 
church lands defrayed the cost of public worship and in- 
struction, of the care of the sick and of the destitute, 
and maintained a class of men who were supposed to be, 
and no doubt to a great extent were, devoting their lives 
to purposes of public good; while the military tenures 
provided for the public defense. In the obligation under 
which the military tenant lay to bring into the field such 
and such a force when need should be, as well as in the 
aid he had to give when the sovereign's eldest son was 
knighted, his daughter married, or the sovereign himself 
made prisoner of war, was a rude and inefficient recogni- 
tion, but still unquestionably a recognition, of the fact, 
obvious to the natural perceptions of all men, that land 
is not individual but common property. 

Nor yet was the control of the possessor of land allowed 
to extend beyond his own life. Although the principle 
of inheritance soon displaced the principle of selection, 
as where power is concentrated it always must, yet feudal 
law required that there should always be some represen- 
tative of a fief, capable of discharging the duties as well 
as of receiving the benefits which were annexed to a 
landed estate, and who this should be was not left to in- 
dividual caprice, but rigorously determined in advance. 
Hence wardship and other feudal incidents. The system 
of primogeniture and its outgrowth, the entail, were in 
their beginnings not the absurdities they afterward 
became. 

The basis of the feudal svstem was the absolute own- 

*/ 

ership of the land, an idea which the barbarians readily 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IN LAND CONSIDERED. 375 

acquired in the midst of a conquered population to whom 
it was familiar; but over this, feudalism threw a superior 
right, and the process of infeudation consisted of bring- 
ing individual dominion into subordination to the supe- 
rior dominion, which represented the larger community 
or nation. Its units were the land owners, who by virtue 
of their ownership were absolute lords on their own do- 
mains, and who there performed the office of protection 
which M. Tame has so graphically described, though per- 
haps with too strong a coloring, in the opening chapter 
of his "Ancient Kegime." The work of the feudal sys- 
tem was to bind together these units into nations, and to 
subordinate the powers and rights of the individual lords 
of land to the powers and rights of collective society, as 
represented by the suzerain or king. 

Thus the feudal system, in its rise and development, 
was a triumph of the idea of the common right to land, 
changing an absolute tenure into a conditional tenure, 
and imposing peculiar obligations in return for the priv- 
ilege of receiving rent. And during the same time, the 
power of land ownership wa£ trenched, as it were, from 
below, the tenancy at will of the cultivators of the soil 
very generally hardening into tenancy by custom, and 
the rent which the lord could exact from the peasant 
becoming fixed and certain. 

And amid the feudal system there remained, or there 
grew up, communities of cultivators, more or less subject 
to feudal dues, who tilled the soil a3 common property; 
and although the lords, where and ^hen they had the 
power, claimed pretty much all thej thought worth 
claiming, yet the idea of common right was strong 
enough to attach itself by custom to a considerable part 
of the land. The commons, in feudal ages, must have 
embraced a very large proportion of the area of most Eu- 
ropean countries. For in France (although the appro- 
priations of these lands by the aristocracy, occasionally 



376 JUSTICE OF THE KEMEDY. Boole V1L 

checked and rescinded by royal edict, had gone on for 
some centuries prior to the Revolution, and during the 
Revolution and First Empire large distributions and sales 
were made), the common or communal lands still 
amount, according to M. de Laveleye, to 4,000,000 hec- 
tares, or 9,884,400 acres. The extent of the common 
land of England during the feudal ages may be inferred 
from the fact that though inclosures by the landed aris- 
tocracy began during the reign of Henry VII., it is stated 
that no less than 7,660,413 acres of common lands were 
inclosed under Acts passed between 1710 and 1843, of 
which 600,000 acres have been inclosed since 1845; and 
it is estimated that there still remain 2,000,000 acres of 
common in England, though of course the most worth- 
less parts of the soil. 

In addition to these common lands, there existed in 
France, until the Revolution, and in parts of Spain, until 
our own day, a custom having all the force of law, by 
which cultivated lands, after the harvest had been 
gathered, became common for purposes of pasturage or 
travel, until the time had come to use the ground again; 
and in some places a custom by which any one had the 
right to go upon ground which its owner neglected to cul- 
tivate, and there to sow and reap a crop in security. And 
if he chose to use manure for the first crop, he acquired 
the right to sow and gather a second crop without let or 
hindrance from the owner. 

It is not merely the Swiss allmend, the Ditmarsh mark, 
the Servian and Russian village communities; not merely 
the long ridges which on English ground, now the ex- 
clusive property of individuals, still enable the antiqua- 
rian to trace out the great fields in ancient time devoted 
to the triennial rotation of crops, and in which each vil- 
lager was annually allotted his equal plot; not merely the 
documentary evidence which careful students have within 
late years drawn from old records; but the very institu* 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IN LAXD CONSIDERED. 377 

tions under which modern civilization has developed, 
which prove the universality and long persistence of the 
recognition of the common right to the use of the soil. 

There still remain in our legal systems survivals that 
have lost their meaning, that, like the still existing re- 
mains of the ancient commons of England, point to this. 
The doctrine of eminent domain, existing as well in Mo- 
hammedan law, which makes the sovereign theoretically 
the only absolute owner of land, springs from nothing 
but the recognition of the sovereign as the representative 
of the collective rights of the people; primogeniture and 
entail, which still exist in England, and which existed 
in some of the American States a hundred years ago, are 
but distorted forms of what was once an outgrowth of 
the apprehension of land as common property. The very 
distinction made in legal terminology between real and 
personal property is but the survival of a primitive dis- 
tinction between what was originally looked upon as com- 
mon property and what from its nature was always con- 
sidered the peculiar property of the individual. And the 
greater care and ceremony which are yet required for the 
transfer of land is but a survival, now meaningless and 
useless, of the more general and ceremonious consent once 
required for the transfer of rights which were looked 
upon, not as belonging to any one member, but to every 
member of a family or tribe. 

The general course of the development of modern 
civilization since the feudal period has been to the sub- 
version of these natural and primary ideas of collective 
ownership in the soil. Paradoxical as it may appear, the 
emergence of liberty from feudal bonds has been accom- 
panied by a tendency in the treatment of land to the form 
of ownership which involves the enslavement of the work- 
ing classes, and which is now beginning to be strongly 
felt all over the civilized world, in the pressure of an iron 
yoke, which cannot be relieved by any extension of mere 



378 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Booh VII. 

political power or personal liberty, and which political 
economists mistake for the pressure of natural laws, and 
workmen for the oppressions of capital. 

This is clear — that in Great Britain to-day the right of 
the people as a whole to the soil of their native country is 
much less fully acknowledged than it was in feudal 
times. A much smaller proportion of the people own the 
soil, and their ownership is much more absolute. The 
commons, once so extensive and so largely contributing to 
the independence and support of the lower classes, have, 
all but a small remnant of yet worthless land, been ap- 
propriated to individual ownership and inclosed; the 
great estates of the church, which were essentially com- 
mon property devoted to a public purpose, have been di- 
verted from that trust to enrich individuals; the dues of 
the military tenants have been shaken off, and the cost of 
maintaining the military establishment and paying the 
interest upon an immense debt accumulated by wars has 
been saddled upon the whole people, in taxes upon the 
necessaries and comforts of life. The crown lands have 
mostly passed into private possession, and for the sup- 
port of the royal family and all the petty princelings who 
marry into it, the British workman must pay in the 
price of his mug of beer and pipe of tobacco. The Eng- 
lish yeoman — the sturdy breed who won Orecy, and Poic- 
tiers, and Agincourt — is as extinct as the mastodon. The 
Scottish clansman, whose right to the soil of his native 
hills was then as undisputed as that of his chieftain, has 
been driven out to make room for the sheep ranges or 
deer parks of that chieftain's descendant; the tribal right 
of the Irishman has been turned into a tenancy-at-will. 
Thirty thousand men have legal power to expel the 
whole population from five-sixths of the British Islands, 
and the vast majority of the British people have no right 
whatever to their native land save to walk the streets or 
trudge the roads. To them may be fittingly applied th^ 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IN LAXD CONSIDERED. 379 

words of a Tribune of the Koman People: "Men of Rome" 
said Tiberius Gracchus — "men of Rome, you are called 
the lords of the -world, yet have no right to a square foot 
of its soil ! The wild beasts have their dens, but the sol- 
diers of Italy have only water and air!" 

The result has, perhaps, been more marked in England 
than anywhere else, but the tendency is observable every- 
where, having gone further in England owing to circum- 
stances which have developed it with greater rapidity. 

The reason, I take it, that with the extension of the 
idea of personal freedom has gone on an extension of the 
idea of private property in land, is that as in the progress 
of civilization the grosser forms of supremacy connected 
with land ownership were dropped, or abolished, or be- 
came less obvious, attention was diverted from the more 
insidious, but really more potential forms, and the land 
owners were easily enabled to put property in land on 
the same basis as other property. 

The growth of national power, either in the form of 
royalty or parliamentary government, stripped the great 
lords of individual power and importance, and of their 
jurisdiction and power over persons, and so repressed 
striking abuses, as the growth of Koman Imperialism 
repressed the more striking cruelties of slavery. The 
disintegration of the large feudal estates, which, until 
the tendency to concentration arising from the modern 
tendency to production upon a large scale is strongly felt, 
operated to increase the number of land owners, and the 
abolition of the restraints by which land owners when 
population was sparser endeavored to compel laborers to 
remain on their estates also contributed to draw away at- 
tention from the essential injustice involved in private 
property in land; while the steady progress of legal ideas 
drawn from the Roman law, which has been the great 
mine and storehouse of modern jurisprudence, tended to 
level the natural distinction between property in land 



380 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book Vll 

and property in other things. Thus, with the extension 
of personal liberty, went on an extension of individual 
proprietorship in land. 

The political power of the barons was, moreover, not 
broken by the revolt of the classes who could clearly feel 
the injustice of land ownership. Such revolts took place, 
again and again; but again and again were they repressed 
with terrific cruelties. What broke the power of the 
barons was the growth of the artisan and trading classes, 
between whose wages and rent there is not the same 
obvious relation. These classes, tocf, developed under a 
system of close guilds and corporations, which, as I have 
previously explained in treating of trade combinations 
and monopolies, enabled them somewhat to fence them- 
selves in from the operation of the general law of wages, 
and which were much more easily maintained than now, 
when the effect of improved methods of transportation, 
and the diffusion of rudimentary education and of cur- 
rent news, is steadily making population more mobile. 
These classes did not see, and do not yet see, that the 
tenure of land is the fundamental fact which must ulti- 
mately determine the conditions of industrial, social, and 
political life. And so the tendency has been to assimi- 
late the idea of property in land with that of property in 
things of human production, and even steps backward 
have been taken, and been hailed, as steps in advance. 
The French Constituent Assembly, in 1789, thought it 
was sweeping away a relic of tyranny when it abolished 
tithes and imposed the support of the clergy on general 
taxation. The Abbe Sieyes stood alone when he told 
them that they were simply remitting to the proprietors 
a tax which was one of the conditions on which they held 
their lands, and reimposing it on the labor of the nation. 
But in vain. The Abbe Siey&s, being a priest, was looked 
on as defending the interests of his order, when in truth 
he was defending the rights of man. In those tithes, 



Chap. IV. PROPERTY IX LAND CONSIDERED. 381 

the French people might have retained a large public rev- 
enue which would not have taken one centime from the 
wagss of labor or the earnings of capital. 

And so the abolition of the military tenures in England 
by the Long Parliament, ratified after the accession of 
Charles II., though simply an appropriation of public 
revenues by the feudal land holders,, who thus got rid of 
the consideration on which they held the common prop- 
erty of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large, 
in the taxation of all consumers, has long been charac- 
terized, and is still held up in the law books, as a triumph 
of the spirit of freedom. Yet here is the source of the 
immense debt and heavy taxation of England. Had the 
form of these feudal dues been simply changed into one 
better adapted to the changed times, English wars need 
never have occasioned the incurring of debt to the 
amount of a single pound, and the labor and capital of 
England need not have been taxed a single farthing for 
the maintenance of a military establishment. All this 
would have come from rent, which the land holders since 
that time have appropriated to themselves — from the tax 
which land ownership levies on the earnings of labor and 
capital. The land holders of England got their land on 
terms which required them even in the sparse population 
of Norman days to put in the field, upon call, sixty thou- 
sand perfectly equipped horsemen,* and on the further 
condition of various fines and incidents which amounted 
to a considerable part of the rent. It would probably be 
a low estimate to put the pecuniary value of these vari- 
ous services and dues at one-half the rental value of the 
land. Had the land holders been kept to this contract 

* Andrew Bisset, in "The Strength of Nations," London, 1859, a 
suggestive work in which he calls the attention of the English people 
to this measure by which the land owners avoided the payment of 
their rent to the nation, disputes the statement of Blackstone that a 
knight's service was but for 40 days, and says it was during necessity. 



382 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII. 

and no land been permitted to be inclosed except upon 
similar terms, the income accruing to the nation from 
English land would to-day be greater by many millions 
than the entire public revenues of the United Kingdom. 
England to-day might have enjoyed absolute free trade. 
There need not have been a customs duty, an excise, 
license, or income tax, yet all the present expenditures 
could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted 
to any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or 
well-being of the whole people. 

Turning back, wherever there is light to guide us, we 
may everywhere see that in their first perceptions, all 
peoples have recognized the common ownership in land, 
and that private property is an usurpation, a creation of 
force and fraud. 

As Madame de Stael said, "Liberty is ancient." Jus- 
tice, if we turn to the most ancient records, will always be 
found to have the title of prescription. 



CHAPTER V. 

OF PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. 

In the earlier stages of civilization we see that land is 
everywhere regarded as common property. And, turn- 
ing from the dim past to our own times, we may see that 
natural perceptions are still the same, and that when 
placed under circumstances in which the influence of ed- 
ucation and habit is weakened, men instinctively recog- 
nize the equality of right to the bounty of nature. 

The discovery of gold in California brought together 
in a new country men who had been used to look on land 
as the rightful subject of individual property, and of 
whom probably not one in a thousand had ever dreamed 
of drawing any distinction between property in land and 
property in anything else. But, for the first time in the 
history of the Anglo-Saxon race, these men were brought 
into contact with land from which gold could be obtained 
by the simple operation of washing it out. 

Had the land with which they were thus called upon to 
deal been agricultural, or grazing, or forest land, of 
peculiar richness; had it been land which derived peculiar 
value from its situation for commercial purposes, or by 
reason of the water power which it afforded; or even had 
it contained rich mines of coal, iron or lead, the land 
system to which they had been used would have been 
applied, and it would have been reduced to private owner- 
ship in large tracts, as even the pueblo lands of San Fran- 
cisco, really the most valuable in the State, which by 
Spanish law had been set apart to furnish homes lor the 
future residents of that city, were reduced, without any 



384- JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII 

protest worth speaking of. But the novelty of the case 
broke through habitual ideas, and threw men back upon 
first principles, and it was by common consent declared 
that this gold-bearing land should remain common prop- 
erty, of which no one might take more than he could rea- 
sonably use, or hold for a longer time than he continued 
to use it. This perception of natural justice was ac* 
quiesced in by the General Government and the courts, 
and while placer mining remained of importance, no at- 
tempt was made to overrule this reversion to primitive 
ideas. The title to the land remained in the govern- 
ment, and no individual could acquire more than a pos- 
sessory claim. The miners in each district fixed tlie 
amount of ground an individual could take and the 
amount of work that must be done to constitute use. If 
this work were not done, any one could re-locate the 
ground. Thus, no one was allowed to forestall or to lock 
up natural resources. Labor was acknowledged as the 
creator of wealth, was given a free field, and secured in 
its reward. The device would not have assured complete 
equality of rights under the conditions that in most coun- 
tries prevail; but under the conditions that there and 
then existed — a sparse population, an unexplored coun- 
try, and an occupation in its nature a lottery, it secured 
substantial justice. One man might strike an enormously 
rich deposit, and others might vainly prospect for months 
and years, but all had an equal chance. No one was al- 
lowed to play the dog in the manger with the bounty of 
the Creator. The essential idea of the mining regula- 
tions was to prevent forestalling and monopoly. Upon 
the same principle are based the mining laws of Mexico; 
and the same principle was adopted in Australia, in Brit- 
ish Columbia, and in the diamond fields of South Africa, 
for it accords with natural perceptions of justice. 

With the decadence of placer mining in California, th* 
accustomed idea of private property finally prevailed in 



Cliap. V. PROPERTY IK LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. 385 

the passage of a law permitting the patenting of mineral 
lands. The only effect is to lock up opportunities — to 
give the owner of mining ground the power of saying that 
no one else may use what he does not choose to use him- 
self. And there are many cases in which mining ground 
is thus withheld from use for speculative purposes, just 
as valuable building lots and agricultural land are with- 
held from use. But while thus preventing use, the ex- 
tension to mineral land of the same principle of private 
ownership which marks the tenure of other lands has 
done nothing for the security of improvements. The 
greatest expenditures of capital in opening and develop- 
ing mines — expenditures that in some cases amounted to 
millions of dollars — were made upon possessory titles. 

Had the circumstances which beset the first English 
settlers in North America been such as to call their at- 
tention de novo to the question of land ownership, there 
can be no doubt that they would have reverted to first 
principles, just as they reverted to first principles in 
matters of government; and individual land ownership 
would have been rejected, just as aristocracy and mon- 
archy were rejected. But while in the country from 
which they came this system had not yet fully developed 
itself, nor its effects been fully felt, the fact that in the 
new country an immense continent invited settlement 
prevented any question of the justice and policy of 
private property in land from arising. For in a new 
country, equality seems sufficiently assured if no one is 
permitted to take land to the exclusion of the rest. At 
first no harm seems to be done by treating this land as 
absolute property. There is plenty of land left for those 
who choose to take it, and the slavery that in a later 
stage of development necessarily springs from the in- 
dividual ownership of land is not felt. 

In Virginia and to the South, where the settlement 
*iad an aristocratic character, the natural complement of 



386 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VII 

the large estates into which the land was carved was 
introduced in the shape of negro slaves But the first 
settlers of New England divided the land as, twelve cen- 
turies before, their ancestors had divided the land of 
Britain, giving to each head of a family his town lot and 
his seed lot, while beyond lay the free common. So far 
as concerned the great proprietors whom the English 
kings by letters patent endeavored to create, the settlers 
saw clearly enough the injustice of the attempted monop- 
oly, and none of these proprietors got much from their 
grants; but the plentifulness of land prevented attention 
from being called to the monopoly which individual land 
ownership, even when the tracts are small, must involve 
when land becomes scarce. And so it has come to pass 
that the great republic of the modern world has adopted 
at the beginning of its career an institution that ruined 
the republics of antiquity; that a people who proclaim 
the inalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness have accepted without question a 
principle which, in denying the equal and inalienable 
right to the soil, finally denies the equal right to life and 
liberty; that a people who at the cost of a bloody war 
have abolished chattel slavery, yet permit slavery in a 
more widespread and dangerous form to take root. 

The continent has seemed so wide, the area over which 
population might yet pour so vast, that familiarized by 
habit with the idea of private property in land, we have 
not realized its essential injustice. For not merely has 
this background of unsettled land prevented the full effect 
of private appropriation from being felt, even in the older 
sections, but to permit a man to take more land than he 
could use, that he might compel those who afterwards 
needed it to pay him for the pfMlege of using it, has not 
seemed so unjust when others in their turn might do the 
same thing by going further on. And more than this, 
the very fortunes that have resulted from the appropria- 



Chap. V. PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. 387 

tion of land, and that have thus really been drawn from 
taxes levied upon the wages of labor, have seemed, and 
have been heralded, as prizes held out to the laborer. 
In all the newer States, and even to a considerable extent 
in the older ones, our landed aristocracy is yet in its first 
generation. Those who have profited by the increase in 
the value of land have been largely men who began life 
without a cent. Their great fortunes, many of them 
running up high into the millions, seem to them, and to 
many others, as the best proofs of the justice of existing 
social conditions in rewarding prudence, foresight, in- 
dustry, and thrift; whereas, the truth is that these for- 
tunes are but the gains of monopoly, and are necessarily 
made at the expense of labor. But the fact that those 
thus enriched started as laborers hides this, and the 
same feeling which leads every ticket holder in a lottery 
to delight in imagination in the magnitude of the prizes 
has prevented even the poor from quarreling with a 
system which thus made many poor men rich. 

In short, the American people have failed to see the 
essential injustice of private property in land, because as 
yet they have not felt its full effects. This public 
domain — the vast extent of land yet to be reduced to 
private possession, the enormous common to which the 
faces of the energetic were always turned, has been the 
great fact that, since the days when the first settlements 
began to fringe the Atlantic Coast, has formed our 
national character and colored our national thought. It 
is not that we have eschewed a titled aristocracy and 
abolished primogeniture; that we elect all our officers 
from school director up to president; that our laws run 
in the name of the people, instead of in the name of a 
prince; that the State knows no religion, and our judges 
wear no wigs — that we have been exempted from the ills 
that Fourth of July orators used to point to as character- 
istic of the effete despotisms of the Old World. The 



388 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Booh VII 

general intelligence, the general comfort, the active in* 
vention, the power of adaptation and assimilation, the 
free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that 
have marked our people, are not causes, but results — they 
have sprung from unfenced land. This public domain 
has been the transmuting force which has turned the 
thriftless, unambitious European peasant into the self- 
reliant Western farmer; it has given a consciousness of 
freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has 
been a well-spring of hope even to those who have never 
thought of taking refuge upon it. The child of the 
people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds ail the 
best seats at the banquet of life marked "taken," and 
must smuggle with his fellows for the crumbs that fall, 
without one chance in a thousand of forcing or sneaking 
his way to a seat. In America, whatever his condition, 
there has always been the consciousness that the public 
domain lay behind him; and the knowledge of this fact, 
acting and reacting, has penetrated our whole national 
life, giving to it generosity and independence, elasticity 
and ambition. All that we are proud of in the American 
character; all that makes our conditions and institutions 
better than those of older countries, we may trace to the 
fact that land has been cheap in the United States, be- 
cause new soil has been open to the emigrant. 

But our advance has reacned the Pacific. Further 
west we cannot go, and incr^sing population can but 
expand north and south and fill up what has been passed 
over. North, it is already filling up the valley of the 
Eed Eiver, pressing into that of the Saskatchewan and 
pre-empti-ng Washington Territory; south, it is covering 
Western Texas and taking up the arable valleys of New 
Mexico and Arizona. 

The republic has entered upon a new era, an era in 
which the monopoly of the land will tell with accelerat- 
ing effect. The great fact which has been so potent ia 



Vhap. V. PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. 389 

ceasing to "be. The public domain is almost gone — a 
very few years will end its influence, already rapidly fail- 
ing. I do not mean to say that there will be no public 
domain. For a long time to come there will be millions 
of acres of public lands carried on the books of the Land 
Department. But it must be remembered that the test 
part of the continent for agricultural purposes is already 
overrun, and that it is the poorest land that is left. It 
must be remembered that what remains comprises the 
great mountain ranges, the sterile deserts, the high 
plains fit only for grazing. And it must be remembered 
that much of this land which figures in the reports as 
open to settlement is unsurveyed land, which has been 
appropriated by possessory claims or locations which do 
not appear until the land is returned as surveyed, Cali- 
fornia figures on the books of the Land Department as 
the greatest land State of the Union, containing nearly 
100,000,000 acres of public land — something like one- 
twelfth of the whole public domain. Yet so much of 
this is covered by railroad grants or held in the way of 
whi^h I have spoken; so much consists of untillable 
mountains or plains which require irrigation; so much is 
monopolized by locations which command the water, that 
as a matter of fact it is difficult to point the immigrant 
to any part of the State where he can take up a farm on 
which he can settle and maintain a family, and so men, 
weary o.f the quest, end by buying land or renting it on 
shares. It is not that there is any real scarcity of land 
in California — for, an empire in herself, California will 
some day maintain a population as large as that of France 
— but appropriation has got ahead of the settler and 
manages to keep just ahead of him. 

Some twelve or fifteen years ago the late Ben Wade of 
Ohio said, in a speech in the United States Senate, that 
by the close of this century every acre of ordinary agricul- 
tural land in the United States would be worth $50 ia 



390 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIL 

gold. It is already clear that if he erred at all, it was in 
overstating the time e In the twenty-one years that re- 
main of the present century, if our population keep on 
increasing at the rate which it has maintained since the 
institution of the government, with the exception of the 
decade which included the civil war, there will be an 
addition to our present population of something like 
forty-five millions, an addition of some seven millions 
more than the total population of the United States as 
shown by the census of 1870, and nearly half as much 
again as the present population of Great Britain. There 
is no question about the ability of the United States to 
support such a population and many hundreds of mil- 
lions more, and, under proper social adjustments, to 
support them in increased comfort; but in view of such 
an increase of population, what becomes of the unappro- 
priated public domain? Practically there will soon cease 
to be any. It will be a very long time before it is all in 
use; but it will be a very short time, as we are going, be- 
fore all that men can turn to use will have an owner. 

But the evil effects of making the land of a whole peo- 
ple the exclusive property of some do not wait for the 
final appropriation of the public domain to show them- 
selves. It is not necessary to contemplate them in the 
future; we may see them in the present. They have 
grown with our growth, and are still increasing. 

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found 
new cities; we drive back the Indian and exterminate 
the buffalo; we girdle the land with iron roads and lace 
the air with telegraph wires; we add knowledge to 
knowledge, and utilize invention after invention; we 
build schools and endow colleges; yet it becomes no 
easier for the masses of our people to make a living. 
On the contrary, it is becoming harder. The wealthy class 
is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is be- 
coming more dependent. The gulf between the em- 



Chap. V. PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. 391 

ployed and the employer is growing wider; social con- 
trasts are becoming sharper; as liveried carriages appear, 
so do barefooted children. We are becoming used to 
talk of the working classes and the propertied classes; 
beggars are becoming so common that where it was once 
thought a crime little short of highway robbery to refuse 
food to one who asked for it, the gate is now barred and 
the bulldog loosed, while laws are passed against vagrants 
which suggest those of Henry VIII. 

We call ourselves the most progressive people on earth. 
But what is the goal of our progress, if these are its 
wayside fruits? 

These are the results of private property in land — the 
effects of a principle that must act with increasing and 
increasing force. It is not that laborers have increased 
faster than capital; it is not that population is pressing 
against subsistence; it is not that machinery has made 
"work scarce;" it is not that there is any real antagonism 
between labor and capital — it is simply that land is becom- 
ing more valuable; that the terms on which labor can 
obtain access to the natural opportunities which alone 
enable it to produce are becoming harder and harder. 
The public domain is receding and narrowing. Property 
in land is concentrating. The proportion of our people 
who have no legal right to the land on which they live is 
becoming steadily larger. 

Says the New York World: "A non-resident pro- 
prietary, like that of Ireland, is getting to be the char- 
acteristic of large farming districts in New England, 
adding yearly to the nominal value of leasehold farms; 
advancing yearly the rent demanded, and steadily de- 
grading the character of the tenantry." And the 
Nation, alluding to the same section, says: "Increased 
nominal value of land, higher rents, fewer farms occu- 
pied by owners; diminished product; lower wages; a 
more ignorant population; increasing number of women 



392 JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. Book VIZ 

employed at hard, outdoor labor (surest sign of a de< 
clining civilization), and a steady deterioration in the 
style of farming — these are the conditions described by a 
cumulative mass of evidence that is perfectly irresistible." 

The same tendency is observable in the new States, 
where the large scale of cultivation recalls the latifundia 
that ruined ancient Italy. In California a very large 
proportion of the farming land is rented from year to 
year, at rates varying from a fourth to even half the 
crop. 

The harder times, the lower wages, the increasing 
poverty perceptible in the United States are but results 
of the natural laws we have traced — laws as universal and 
as irresistible as that of gravitation. We did not estab- 
lish the republic when, in the face of principalities and 
powers, we flung the declaration of the inalienable rights 
of man; we shall never establish the republic until we 
practically carry out that declaration by securing to the 
poorest child born among us an equal right to his native 
soil! We did not abolish slavery when we ratified the 
Fourteenth Amendment; to abolish slavery we must 
abolish private property in land! Unless we come back 
to first principles, unless we recognize natural percep- 
tions of equity, unless we acknowledge the equal right ot 
all to land, our free institutions will be in vain; our com- 
mon schools will be in vain; our discoveries and inven- 
tions will but add to the force that presses the masses 
^own! 



BOOK VIII. 

APPLICATION OF THE KEMEDY. 



CHAPTER I. — PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND INCONSISTENT 

WITH THE BEST USE OE LAND. 

CHAPTER II. — HOW EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE LAND MAY BE 

ASSERTED AND SECURED. 

CHAPTER III. — THE PROPOSITION TRIED BY THE CANONS 

OF TAXATION. 

CHAPTER IT. — INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS, 






Why hesitate ? Ye are full-bearded men, 

With God-implanted will, and courage if 

Ye dare but show it. Never yet was will 

But found some way or means to work it out, 

Nor e'er did Fortune frown on him who dared. 

Shall we in presence of this grievous wrong, 

In this supremest moment of all time, 

Stand trembling, cowering, when with one bold stroke 

These groaning millions might be ever free ? — 

And that one stroke so just, so greatly good 

So level with the happiness of man, 

That all the angels will applaud the deed. 

— K B. Taylor. 



CHAPTEE I. 

PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND INCONSISTENT WITH THE 
BEST USE OF LAND. 

There is a delusion resulting from the tendency to 
confound the accidental with the essential — a delusion 
which the law writers have done their best to extend, 
and political economists generally have acquiesced in, 
rather than endeavored to expose — that private property 
in land is necessary to the proper use of land, and that 
again to make land common property would be to destroy 
civilization and revert to barbarism. 

This delusion may be likened to the idea which, ac- 
cording to Charles Lamb, so long prevailed among the 
Chinese after the savor of roast pork had been accident- 
ally discovered by the burning down of Ho-ti's hut — that 
to cook a pig it was necessary to set fire to a house. But, 
though in Lamb's charming dissertation it was required 
that a sage should arise to teach people that they might 
roast pigs without burning down houses, it does not take 
a sage to see that what is required for the improvement 
of land is not absolute ownership of the land, but secur- 
ity for the improvements. This will be obvious to who- 
ever will look around him. While there is no more 
necessity for making a man the absolute and exclusive 
owner of land, in order to induce him to improve it, than 
there is of burning down a house in order to cook a pig; 
while the making of land private property is as rude, 
wasteful, and uncertain a device for securing improve- 
ment, as the burning down of a house is a rude, waste- 
ful, and uncertain device for roasting a pig, we have not 



396 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIIL 

the excuse for persisting in the one that Lamb's China- 
men had for persisting in the other. Until the sage 
arose who invented the rude gridiron, which according 
to Lamb, preceded the spit and oven, no one had known 
or heard of a pig being roasted, except by a house being 
burned. But, among us, nothing is more common than 
for land to be improved by those who do not own it. 
The greater part of the land of Great Britain is culti- 
vated by tenants, the greater part of the buildings of 
London are built upon leased ground, and even in the 
United States the same system prevails everywhere to a 
greater or less extent. Thus it is a common matter for 
use to be separated from ownership. 

Would not all this land be cultivated and improved 
just as well if the rent went to the State or municipality, 
as now, when it goes to private individuals? If no 
private ownership in land were acknowledged, but all 
land were held in this way, the occupier or user paying 
rent to the State, would not land be used and improved 
as well and as securely as now? There can be but one 
answer: Of course it would. Then would the resumption 
of land as common property in nowise interfere with the 
proper use and improvement of land. 

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private 
ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not 
necessary to say to a man, "this land is yours/' in order 
to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only nec- 
essary to say to him, "whatever your labor or capital 
produces on this land shall be yours." Give a man 
security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of 
the possession of the house he wants to build, and he 
will build it. These are the natural rewards of labor. It 
is for the sake of the reaping that men sow; it is for the 
sake of possessing houses that men build. The owner- 
ship of land has nothing to do with it. 

It was for the sake of obtaining this security, that in 



Chap.l. OWNERSHIP AND THE USE OF LAND. 397 

the beginning of the feudal period so many of the smaller 
land holders surrendered the ownership of their lands to 
a military chieftain, receiving back the use of them in 
fief or trust, and kneeling bareheaded before the lord, 
with their hands between his hands, swore to serve him 
with life, and limb, and worldly honor. Similar in- 
stances of the giving up of ownership in land for the 
sake of security in its enjoyment are to be seen in 
Turkey, where a peculiar exemption from taxation and 
extortion attaches to vakouf, or church lands, and where 
it is a common thing for a land owner to sell his land to 
a mosque for a nominal price, with the understanding 
that he may remain as tenant upon it at a fixed rent. 

It is not the magic of property, as Arthur Young said, 
that has turned Flemish sands into fruitful fields. It is 
the magic of security to labor. This can be secured in 
other ways than making land private property, just as 
the heat necessary to roast a pig can be secured in other 
ways than by burning down houses. The mere pledge of 
an Irish landlord that for twenty years he would not 
claim in rent any share in their cultivation induced Irish 
peasants to turn a barren mountain into gardens; on 
the mere security of a fixed ground rent for a term of 
years the most costly buildings of such cities as London 
and New York are erected on leased ground. If we give 
improvers such security, we may safely abolish private 
property in land. 

The complete recognition of common rights to land 
need in no way interfere with the complete recognition 
of individual right to improvements or produce. Two 
men may own a ship without sawing her in half. The 
ownership of a railway may be divided into a hundred 
thousand shares, and yet trains be run with as much 
system and precision as if there were but a single owner. 
In London, joint stock companies have been formed to 
hold and manage real estate. Everything could go on as 



398 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book V1IL 

now, and yet the common right to land be fully recog- 
nized by appropriating rent to the common benefit. 
There is a lot in the center of San Francisco to which 
the common rights of the people of that city are yet 
legally recognized. This lot is not cut up into infinites- 
imal pieces nor yet is it an unused waste. It is covered 
with fine buildings, the property of private individuals, 
that stand there in perfect security. The only difference 
between this lot and those around it, is that the rent of 
the one goes into the common school fund, the rent of 
the others into private pockets. What is to prevent the 
land of a whole country being held by the people of the 
country in this way? 

It would be difficult to select any portion of the terri- 
tory of the United States in which the conditions com- 
monly taken to necessitate the reduction of land to 
private ownership exist in higher degree than on the 
little islets of St. Peter and St. Paul, in the Aleutian 
Archipelago, acquired by the Alaska purchase from 
Kussia. These islands are the breeding places of the 
fur seal, an animal so timid and wary that the slightest 
fright causes it to abandon its accustomed resort, never 
to return. To prevent the utter destruction of this 
fishery, without which the islands are of no use to man, 
it is not only necessary to avoid killing the females and 
young cubs, but even such noises as the discharge of a 
pistol or the barking of a dog. The men who do the 
killing must be in no hurry, but quietly walk around 
among the seals who line the rocky beaches, until the 
timid animals, so clumsy on land but so graceful in 
water, show no more sign of fear than lazily to waddle 
out of the way. Then those who can be killed without 
diminution of future increase are carefully separated and 
gently driven inland, out of sight and hearing of the 
herds, where they are dispatched with clubs. To throw 
such a fishery as this open to whoever chose to go and 



Chap. I. OWNERSHIP AND THE USE OF LAND. 399 

kill — which would make it to the interest of each party 
co kill as many as they could at the time without refer- 
ence to the future — would be utterly to destroy it in a 
few seasons, as similar fisheries in other oceans have 
been destroyed. But it is not necessary, therefore, to 
make these islands private property. Though for 
reasons greatly less cogent, the great public domain of 
the American people has been made over to private 
ownership as fast as anybody could be got to take it, 
these islands have been leased at a rent of $317-,500 per 
year,* probably not very much less than they could have 
been sold for at the time of the Alaska purchase. They 
have already yielded two millions and a half to the 
national treasury, and they are still, in unimpaired value 
(for under the careful management of the Alaska Fur 
Company the seals increase rather than diminish), the 
common property of the people of the United States. 

So far from the recognition of private property in land 
being necessary to the proper use of land, the contrary is 
the case. Treating land as private property stands in the 
way of its proper use. Were land treated as public 
property it would be used and improved as soon as there 
was need for its use or improvement, but being treated 
as private property, the individual owner is permitted to 
prevent others from using or improving what he cannot 
or will not use or improve himself. When the title is in 
dispute, the most valuable land lies unimproved for 
years; in many parts of England improvement is stopped 
because, the estates being entailed, no security to im- 
provers can be given; and large tracts of ground which, 
were they treated as public property, would be covered 
with buildings and crops, are kept idle to gratify the 

* The fixed rent under the lease to the Alaska Fur Company is 
$55,000 a year, with a payment of $2.62 1-2 on each skin, which on 
100,000 skins, to which the take is limited, amounts to $262,500 — a 
total rent of $317,500. 



400 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIII. 

caprice of the owner. In the thickly settled parts of the 
United States there is enough land to maintain three or 
four times our present population, lying unused, because 
its owners are holding it for higher prices, and im- 
migrants are forced past this unused land to seek homes 
where their labor will be far less productive. In every 
city valuable lots may be seen lying vacant for the same 
reason. If the best use of land be the test, then private 
property in land is condemned, as it is condemned by 
every other consideration. It is as wasteful and uncer- 
tain a mode of securing the proper use of land as the 
burning down of houses is of roasting pigs. 



CHAPTER II. 

HOW EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE LAND MAY BE ASSERTED 

AND SECURED. 

We have traced the want and suffering that every- 
where prevail among the working classes, the recurring 
paroxysms of industrial depression, the scarcity of em- 
ployment, the stagnation of capital, the tendency of 
wages to the starvation point, that exhibit themselves 
more and more strongly as material progress goes on, to 
the fact that the land on which and from which all must 
live is made the exclusive property of some. 

We have seen that there is no possible remedy for these 
evils but the abolition of their cause; we have seen that 
private property in land has no warrant in justice, but 
stands condemned as the denial of natural right — a sub- 
version of the law of nature that as social development 
goes on must condemn the masses of men to a slavery the 
hardest and most degrading. 

We have weighed every objection, and seen that neither 
on the ground of equity or expediency is there anything 
to deter us from making land common property by con- 
fiscating rent. 

But a question of method remains. How shall we do 
it? 

We should satisfy the law of justice, we should meet 
all economic requirements, by at one stroke abolishing 
all private titles, declaring all land public property, and 
letting it out to the highest bidders in lots to suit, under 
such conditions as would sacredly guard the private right 
to improvements. 

Thus we should secure, in a more complex state of 



402 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIII. 

society, the same equality of rights that in a ruder state 
were secured by equal partitions of the soil, and by giv- 
ing the use of the land to whoever could procure the 
most from it, we should secure the greatest production. 

Such a plan, instead of being a wild, impracticable 
vagary, has (with the exception that he suggests com- 
pensation to the present holders of land — undoubtedly a 
careless concession which he upon reflection would recon- 
sider) been indorsed by no less eminent a thinker than 
Herbert Spencer, who ("Social Statics," Chap. IX, Sec. 
8) says of it: 

" Such a doctrine is consistent with the highest state of civiliza- 
tion ; may be carried out without involving a community of goods, 
and need cause no very serious revolution in existing arrangements. 
The change required would simply be a change of landlords. Sepa- 
rate ownership would merge into the joint-stock ownership of the 
public. Instead of being in the possession of individuals, the coun- 
try would be held by the great corporate body — society. Instead of 
leasing his acres from an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease 
them from the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of 
Sir John or his Grace, he would pay it to an agent or deputy agent 
of the community. Stewards would be public officials instead of 
private ones, and tenancy the only land tenure. A state of things 
so ordered would be in perfect harmony with the moral law. Under 
it all men would be equally landlords, all men would be alike free 
to become tenants. * * * Clearly, therefore, on such a system, 
the earth might be enclosed, occupied and cultivated, in entire sub- 
ordination to the law of equal freedom. " 

But such a plan, though perfectly feasible, does not 
seem to me the best. Or rather I propose to accomplish 
the same thing in a simpler, easier, and quieter way, 
than that of formally confiscating all the land and 
formally letting it out to the highest bidders. 

To do that would involve a needless shock to present 
customs and habits of thought — which is to be avoided. 

To do that would involve a needless extension of gov- 
ernmental machinery — which is to be avoided. 



:hap. II. HOW EQUAL RIGHTS MAY BE ASSERTED. 403 

It is an axiom of statesmanship, which the successful 
founders of tyranny have understood and acted upon — - 
that great changes can best be brought about under old 
forms. We, who would free men, should heed the same 
truth. It is the natural method. When nature would 
make a higher type, she takes a lower one and develops 
it. This, also, is the law of social growth. Let us work 
by it. With the current we may glide fast and far. 
Against it, it is hard pulling and slow progress. 

I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate 
private property in land. The first would be unjust; 
the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold 
it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they 
are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call 
it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and 
devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we 
take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it 
is only necessary to confiscate rent. 

Nor to take rent for public uses is it necessary that the 
State should bother with the letting of lands, and assume 
the chances of the favoritism, collusion, and corruption 
this might involve. It is not necessary that any new 
machinery should be created. The machinery already 
exists. Instead of extending it, all we have to do is to 
simplify and reduce it. By leaving to land owners a 
percentage of rent which would probably be much less 
than the cost and loss involved in attempting to rent 
lands through State agency, and by making use of this 
existing machinery, we may, without jar or shock, assert 
the common right to land by taking rent for public uses. 

We already take some rent in taxation. We have only 
to make some changes in our modes of taxation to take 
it all. 

What I, therefore, propose, as the simple yet sovereign 
remedy, which will raise wages, increase the earnings of 
capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give re- 



404: APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIII 

munerative employment to whoever wishes it, afford free 
scope to human powers, lessen crime, elevate morals, 
and taste, and intelligence, purify government and carry 
civilization to yet nobler heights, is — to appropriate rent 
hy taxation. 

In this way the State may become the universal land- 
lord without calling herself so, and without assuming a 
single new function. In form, the ownership of land 
would remain just as now. No owner of land need be 
dispossessed, and no restriction need be placed upon the 
amount of land any one could hold. For, rent being 
taken by the State in taxes, land, no matter in whose 
name it stood, or in what parcels it was held, would be 
really common property, and every member of the com- 
munity would participate in the advantages of its owner- 
ship. 

Now, insomuch as the taxation of rent, or land values, 
must necessarily be increased just as we abolish other 
taxes, we may put the proposition into practical form by 
proposing — 

To alolish all taxation save that upon land values. 

As we have seen, the value of land is at the beginning 
of society nothing, but as society develops by the in- 
crease of population and the advance of the arts, it 
becomes greater and greater. In every civilized country, 
even the newest, the value of the land taken as a whole is 
sufficient to bear the entire expenses of government. In 
the better developed countries it is much more than 
sufficient. Hence it will not be enough merely to place 
all taxes upon the value of land. It will be necessary, 
where rent exceeds the present governmental revenues, 
commensurately to increase the amount demanded in 
taxation, and to continue this increase as society pro- 
gresses and rent advances. But this is so natural and 
easy a matter, that it may be considered as involved, or 
at least understood, in the proposition to put all taxes 



Chap. n. HOW EQUAL RIGHTS MAY BE ASSERTED. 405 

on the value of land. That is the first step, upon which 
the practical struggle must be made. When the hare is 
once caught and killed, cooking him will follow as a 
matter of course. When the common right to land is so 
far appreciated that all taxes are abolished save those 
which fall upon rent, there is no danger of much more 
than is necessary to induce them to collect the public 
revenues being left to individual land holders. 

Experience has taught me (for I have been for some 
years endeavoring to popularize this proposition) that 
wherever the idea of concentrating all taxation upon land 
values finds lodgment sufficient to induce consideration, 
it invariably makes way, but that there are few of the 
classes most to be benefited by it, who at first, or even 
for a long time afterward, see its full significance and 
power. It is difficult for workingmen to get over the 
idea that there is a real antagonism between capital and 
labor. It is difficult for small farmers and homestead 
owners to get over the idea that to put all taxes on the 
value of land would be unduly to tax them. It is diffi- 
cult for both classes to get over the idea that to exempt 
capital from taxation would be to make the rich richer, 
and the poor poorer. These ideas spring from confused 
thought. But behind ignorance and prejudice there is 
a powerful interest, which has hitherto dominated litera- 
ture, education, and opinion. A great wrong always 
dies hard, and the great wrong which in every civilized 
country condemns the masses of men to poverty and 
want, will not die without a bitter struggle. 

I do not think the ideas of which I speak can be enter- 
tained by the reader who has followed me thus far; but 
inasmuch as any popular discussion must deal with the 
concrete, rather than with the abstract, let me ask him 
to follow me somewhat further, that we may try the 
remedy I have proposed by the accepted canons of taxa- 
tion. In doing so, many incidental bearings may be seen 
that otherwise might escape notice. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE PROPOSITION TRIED BY THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 

The best tax by which public revenues can be raised 
is evidently that which will closest conform to the fol- 
lowing conditions: 

1. That it bear as lightly as possible upon production 
— so as least to check the increase of the general fund 
from which taxes must be paid and the community main- 
tained. 

2. That it be easily and cheaply collected, and fall as 
directly as may be upon the ultimate payers — so as to 
take from the people as little as possible in addition to 
what it yields the government. 

3. That it be certain — so as to give the least opportu- 
nity for tyranny or corruption on the part of officials, and 
the least temptation to law-breaking and evasion on the 
part of the taxpayers. 

4. That it bear equally — so as to give no citizen an 
advantage or put any at a disadvantage, as compared 
with others. 

Let us consider what form of taxation best accords 
with these conditions. Whatever it be, that evidently 
will be the best mode in which the public revenues can 
be raised. 

2". — The Effect of Taxes upon Production. 

All taxes must evidently come from the produce of 
land and labor, since there is no other source of wealth 
than the union of human exertion with the material and 



Chap.ni. THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 407 

forces of nature. But the manner in which equal 
amounts of taxation may be imposed may very differently 
affect the production of wealth. Taxation which lessens 
the reward of the producer necessarily lessens the incen- 
tive to production; taxation which is conditioned upon 
the act of production, or the use of any of the three 
factors of production, necessarily discourages produc- 
tion. Thus taxation which diminishes the earnings of 
the laborer or the returns of the capitalist tends to ren- 
der the one less industrious and intelligent, the other 
less disposed to save and invest. Taxation which falls 
upon the processes of production interposes an artificial 
obstacle to the creation of wealth. Taxation which falls 
upon labor as it is exerted, wealth as it is used as capital, 
and land as it is cultivated, will manifestly tend to discour- 
age production much more powerfully than taxation to the 
same amount levied upon laborers, whether they work or 
play, upon wealth whether used productively or unpro- 
ductively, or upon land whether cultivated or left waste. 

The mode of taxation is, in fact, quite as important as 
the amount. As a small burden badly placed may dis- 
tress a horse that could carry with ease a much larger 
one properly adjusted, so a people may be impoverished 
and their power of producing wealth destroyed by taxa- 
tion, which, if levied in another way, could be borne with 
ease. A tax on date-trees, imposed by Mohammed Ali, 
caused the Egyptian fellahs to cut down their trees; but 
a tax of twice the amount imposed on the land produced 
no such result. The tax of ten per cent, on all sales, 
imposed by the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, would, 
had it been maintained, have all but stopped exchange 
while yielding but little revenue. 

But we need not go abroad for illustrations. The 
production of wealth in the United States is largely 
lessened by taxation which bears upon its processes. 
Ship-building, in which we excelled, has been all but 



408 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIIL 

destroyed, so far as the foreign trade is concerned, and 
many branches of production and exchange seriously 
crippled, by taxes which divert industry from more to 
less productive forms. 

This checking of production is in greater or less de- 
gree characteristic of most of the taxes by which the 
revenues of modern governments are raised. All taxes 
upon manufactures, all taxes upon commerce, all taxes 
upon capital, all taxes upon improvements, are of this 
kind. Their tendency is the same as that of Mohammed 
Ali's tax on date-trees, though their effect may not be so 
clearly seen. 

All such taxes have a tendency to reduce the produc- 
tion of wealth, and should, therefore, never be resorted 
to when it is possible to raise money by taxes which do 
not check production. This becomes possible as society 
develops and wealth accumulates. Taxes which fall 
upon ostentation would simply turn into the public 
treasury what otherwise would be wasted in vain show 
for the sake of show; and taxes upon wills and devises of 
the rich would probably have little effect in checking 
the desire for accumulation, which, after it has fairly got 
hold of a man, becomes a blind passion. But the great 
class of taxes from which revenue may be derived with- 
out interference with production are taxes upon monop- 
olies — for the profit of monopoly is in itself a tax levied 
upon production, and to tax it is simply to divert into 
the public coffers what production must in any event 

pay. 

There are among us various sorts of monopolies. For 
instance, there are the temporary monopolies created by 
the patent and copyright laws. These it would be ex- 
tremely unjust and unwise to tax, inasmuch as they are 
but recognitions of the right of labor to its intangible 
productions, and constitute a reward held out to inven- 



Chap. III. THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 409 

tion and authorship.* There are also the onerous monop- 
olies alluded to in Chapter IV of Book III, which result 
from the aggregation of capital in businesses which are of 
the nature of monopolies. But while it would be ex- 
tremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, to levy 
taxes by general law so that they would fall exclusively 
on the returns of such monopoly and not become taxes 
on production or exchange, it is much better that these 
monopolies should be abolished. In large part they 
spring from legislative commission or omission, as, for 
instance, the ultimate reason that San Francisco mer- 
chants are compelled to pay more for goods sent direct 
from New York to San Francisco by the Isthmus route 
than it costs to ship them from New York to Liverpool 
or Southampton and thence to San Francisco, is to be 
found in the "protective" laws which make it so costly 

* Following the habit of confounding the exclusive right granted 
by a patent and that granted by a copyright as recognitions of the 
right of labor to its intangible productions, I in this fell into error 
which I subsequently acknowledged and corrected in the Standard 
of June 23, 1888. The two things are not alike, but essentially 
different. The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, 
an idea, or a combination, which by the natural law r of property all 
are free to use; but only to the labor expended in the thing itself. 
It does not prevent any one from using for himself the facts, the 
knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but 
only from using the identical form of the particular book or other 
production — the actual labor which has in short been expended in 
producing it. It rests therefore upon the natural, moral right of 
each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no 
interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise. 

The patent, on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a 
similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference 
with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests. The 
copyright is therefore in accordance with the moral law — it gives to 
the man who has expended the intangible labor required to write a 
particular book or paint a picture security against the copying of that 
identical thing. The patent is in defiance of this natural right. It 
prohibits others from doing what has been already attempted. Every 



410 APPLICATION OF THE KEMEDY. Book VIII 

to build American steamers and which forbid foreign 
steamers to carry goods between American ports. The 
reason that residents of Nevada are compelled to pay as 
much freight from the East as though their goods were 
carried to San Francisco and back again, is that the 
authority which prevents extortion on the part of a hack 
driver is not exercised in respect to a railroad company. 
And it may be said generally that businesses which are in 
their nature monopolies are properly part of the functions 
of the State, and should be assumed by the State. There 
is the same reason why Government should carry tele- 
graphic messages as that it should carry letters; that rail- 
roads should belong to the public as that common roads 
should. 

But all other monopolies are trivial in extent as com- 
pared with the monopoly of land. And the value of land 
expressing a monopoly, pure and simple, is in every re- 
spect fitted for taxation. That is to say, while the value 
of a railroad or telegraph line, the price of gas or of a 
patent medicine, may express the price of monopoly, it 
also expresses the exertion of labor and capital; but the 
value of land, or economic rent, as we have seen, is in no 
part made up from these factors, and expresses nothing 
but the advantage of appropriation. Taxes levied upon 
the value of land cannot check production in the slight- 
est degree, until they exceed rent, or the value of land 

one has a moral right to think what I think, or to perceive what I 
perceive, or to do what I do — no matter whether he gets the hint from 
me or independently of me. Discovery can give no right of owner- 
ship, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be 
discovered. If a man make a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, 
he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or pic- 
ture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making sim- 
ilar things. Such a prohibition, though given for the purpose of 
stimulating discovery and invention, really in the long run operates 
as a check upon them. 



Chap. Ill THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 411 

taken annually, for unlike taxes upon commodities, or 
exchange, or capital, or any of the tools or processes of 
production, they do not bear upon production. The 
value of land does not express the reward of production, 
as does the value of crops, of cattle, of buildings, or any of 
the things which are styled personal property and improve- 
ments. It expresses the exchange value of monopoly. 
It is not in any case the creation of the individual who 
owns the land; it is created by the growth of the com- 
munity. Hence the community can take it all without 
in any way lessening the incentive to improvement or in 
the slightest degree lessening the production of wealth. 
Taxes may be imposed upon the value of land until all 
rent is taken by the State, without reducing the wages 
of labor or the reward of capital one iota; without in- 
creasing the price of a single commodity, or making pro- 
duction in any way more difficult. 

But more than this. Taxes on the value of land not 
only do not check production as do most other taxes, but 
they tend to increase production, by destroying specula- 
tive rent. How speculative rent checks production may 
be seen not only in the valuable land withheld from use, 
but in the paroxysms of industrial depression which, 
originating in the speculative advance in land values,, 
propagate themselves over the whole civilized world, 
everywhere paralyzing industry, and causing more waste 
and probably more suffering than would a general war. 
Taxation which would take rent for public uses would 
prevent all this; while if land were taxed to anything 
near its rental value, no one could afford to hold land 
that he was not using, and, consequently, land not in 
use would be thrown open to those who would use it. 
Settlement would be closer, and, consequently, labor and 
capital would be enabled to produce much more with the 
same exertion. The dog in the manger who, in this 
country especially, so wastes productive power, would be 
choked off. 



412 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book Vlll 

There is yet an even more important way by which, 
through its effect upon distribution, the taking of rent 
to public uses by taxation would stimulate the produc- 
tion of wealth. But reference to that may be reserved. 
It is sufficiently evident that with regard to production, 
the tax upon the value of land is the best tax that can be 
imposed. Tax manufactures, and the effect is to check 
manufacturing; tax improvements, and the effect is to 
lessen improvement; tax commerce, and the effect is to 
prevent exchange; tax capital, and the effect is to drive 
it away. But the whole value of land may be taken in 
taxation, and the only effect will be to stimulate industry, 
to open new opportunities to capital, and to increase the 
production of wealth. 

II. — As to Ease and Cheapness of Collection. 

With, perhaps, the exception of certain licenses and 
stamp duties, which may be made almost to collect them- 
selves, but which can be relied on for only a trivial 
amount of revenue, a tax upon land values can, of all 
taxes, be most easily and cheaply collected. For land 
cannot be hidden or carried off; its value can be readily 
ascertained, and the assessment once made, nothing but 
a receiver is required for collection. 

And as under all fiscal systems some part of the public 
revenues is collected from taxes on land, and the 
machinery for that purpose already exists and could as 
well be made to collect all as a part, the cost of collecting 
the revenue now obtained by other taxes might be en- 
tirely saved by substituting the tax on land values for all 
other taxes. What an enormous saving might thus be 
made can be inferred from the horde of officials now en- 
gaged in collecting these taxes. 

This saving would largely reduce the difference be- 
tween what taxation now costs the people and what it 
yields, but the substitution of a tax on land values for 



1 



Chap. III. THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 413 

all other taxes would operate to reduce this difference in 
an even more important way. 

A tax on land values does not add to prices, and is thus 
paid directly by the persons on whom it falls: whereas, 
all taxes upon things of unfixed quantity increase prices, 
and in the course of exchange are shifted from seller to 
buyer, increasing as they go. If we impose a tax upon 
money loaned, as has been often attempted, the lender 
will charge the tax to the borrower, and the borrower 
must pay it or not obtain the loan. If the borrower uses 
it in his business, he in his turn must get back the tax 
from his customers, or his business becomes unprofitable. 
If we impose a tax upon buildings, the users of buildings 
must finally pay it, for the erection of buildings will 
cease until building rents become high enough to pay 
the regular profit and the tax besides. If we impose a 
tax upon manufactures or imported goods, the manufac- 
turer or importer will charge it in a higher price to the job- 
ber, the jobber to the retailer, and the retailer to the 
consumer. Now, the consumer, on whom the tax thub 
ultimately falls, must not only pay the amount of the tax, 
but also a profit on this amount to every one who has thus 
advanced it — for profit on the capital he has advanced in 
paying taxes is as much required by each dealer as profit- 
on the capital he has advanced in paying for goods. 
Manila cigars cost, when bought of the importer in San 
Francisco, $70 a thousand, of which $14 is the cost of 
the cigars laid down in this port and $56 is the customs 
duty. But the dealer who purchases these cigars to 
sell again must charge a profit, not on $14, the real cost 
of the cigars, but on $70, the cost of the cigars plus the 
duty. In this way all taxes which add to prices are 
shifted from hand to hand, increasing as they go, until 
they ultimately rest upon consumers, who thus pay much 
more than is received by the government. Now, the 
way taxes raise prices is by increasing the cost of pro* 



414 APPLICATION" OF THE REMEDY. Book VIII 

duction, and checking supply. But land is not a thing 
of human production, and taxes upon rent cannot check 
supply. Therefore, though a tax on rent compels the 
land owners to pay more, it gives them no power to 
obtain more for the use of their land, as it in no way 
tends to reduce the supply of land. On the contrary, 
by compelling those who hold land on speculation to sell 
or let for what they can get, a tax on land values tends 
to increase the competition between owners, and thus to 
reduce the price of land. 

Thus in all respects a tax upon land values is the 
cheapest tax by which a large revenue can be raised — 
giving to the government the largest net revenue in pro- 
portion to the amount taken from the people. 

III. — As to Certainty. 

Certainty is an important element in taxation, for just 
as the collection of a tax depends upon the diligence and 
faithfulness of the collectors and the public spirit and 
honesty of those who are to pay it, will opportunities 
for tyranny and corruption be opened on the one side, 
and for evasions and frauds on the other. 

The methods by which the bulk of our revenues are 
collected are condemned on this ground, if on no other. 
The gross corruptions and fraud occasioned in the 
United States by the whisky and tobacco taxes are well 
known; the constant undervaluations of the Custom 
House, the ridiculous untruthfulness of income tax re- 
turns, and the absolute impossibility of getting anything 
like a just valuation of personal property, are matters of 
notoriety. The material loss which such taxes inflict— 
the item of cost which this uncertainty adds to the 
amount paid by the people but not received by the gov- 
ernment — is very great. When, in the days of the pro- 
tective system of England, her coasts were lined with an 
army of men endeavoring to prevent smuggling, and an- 



Chap. Ill THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 415 

other army of men were engaged in evading them, it is 
evident that the maintenance of both armies had to 
come from the produce of labor and capital; that the 
expenses and profits of the smugglers, as well as the pay 
and bribes of the Custom House officers, constituted a 
tax upon the industry of the nation, in addition to what 
was received by the government. And so, all douceurs 
to assessors; all bribes to customs officials; all moneys 
expended in electing pliable officers or in procuring acts 
or decisions which avoid taxation; all the costly modes 
of bringing in goods so as to evade duties, and of manu- 
facturing so as to evade imposts; all moieties, and ex- 
penses of detectives and spies; all expenses of legal pro- 
ceedings and punishments, not only to the government, 
but to those prosecuted, are so much which these taxes 
take from the general fund of wealth, without adding to 
the revenue. 

Yet this is the least part of the cost. Taxes which 
lack the element of certainty tell most fearfully upon 
morals. Our revenue laws as a body might well be en- 
titled, "Acts to promote the corruption of public officials, 
to suppress honesty and encourage fraud, to set a pre- 
mium upon perjury and the subornation of perjury, and 
to divorce the idea of law from the idea of justice." 
This is their true character, and they succeed admirably. 
A. Custom House oath is a by-word; our assessors regu- 
larly swear to assess all property at its full, true, cash 
value, and habitually do nothing of the kind; men who 
pride themselves on their personal and commercial honor 
bribe officials and make false returns; and the demoraliz- 
ing spectacle is constantly presented of the same court 
trying a ijmrderer one day and a vender of unstamped 
matches the next! 

So uncertain and so demoralizing are these modes of 
taxation that the New York Commission, composed of 
David A. Wells, Edwin Dodge and George W. Cuyler 5 



416 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Booh V1IL 

who investigated the subject of taxation in that State s 
proposed to substitute for most of the taxes now levied, 
other than that on real estate, an arbitrary tax on each 
individual, estimated on the rental value of the premises 
he occupied. 

But there is no necessity of resorting to any arbitrary 
assessment. The tax on land values, which is the least 
arbitrary of taxes, possesses in the highest degree the 
element of certainty. It may be assessed and collected 
with a definiteness that partakes of the immovable and 
unconcealable character of the land itself. Taxes levied 
on land may be collected to the last cent, and though 
the assessment of land is now often unequal, yet the 
assessment of personal property is far more unequal, and 
these inequalities in the assessment of land largely arise 
from the taxation of improvements with land, and from 
the demoralization that, springing from the causes to 
which I have referred, affects the whole scheme of taxa- 
tion. Were all taxes placed upon land values, irrespec- 
tive of improvements, the scheme of taxation would be 
so simple and clear, and public attention would be so 
directed to it, that the valuation of taxation could and 
would be made with the same certainty that a real estate 
agent can determine the price a seller can get for a lot. 

IV. — As to Equality. 

Adam Smith's canon is, that "The subjects of every 
state ought to contribute toward the support of the 
government as nearly as possible in proportion to their 
respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue 
which they respectively enjoy under the protection of 
the state." Every tax, he goes on to say, which falls 
only upon rent, or only upon wages, or only upon in- 
terest, is necessarily unequal. In accordance with this 
is the common idea which our systems of taxing every- 
thing vainly attempt to carry out — that every one should 



Chap. III. THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 417 

pay taxes in proportion to his means, or in proportion to 
his income. 

But, waiving all the insuperable practical difficulties in 
the way of taxing every one according to his means, it is 
evident that justice cannot be thus attained. 

Here, for instance, are two men of equal means, or 
equal incomes, one having a large family, the other hav- 
ing no one to support but himself. Upon these two men 
indirect taxes fall very unequally, as the one cannot 
avoid the taxes on the food, clothing, etc., consumed by 
his family, while the other need pay only upon the neces- 
saries consumed by himself. But, supposing taxes levied 
directly, so that each pays the same amount. Still there 
is injustice. The income of the one is charged with the 
support of six, eight, or ten persons; the income of the 
other with that of but a single person. And unless the 
Malthusian doctrine be carried to the extent of regard- 
ing the rearing of a new citizen as an injury to the state, 
here is a gross injustice. 

But it may be said that this is a difficulty which cannot 
be got over; that it is Nature herself that brings human 
beings helpless into the world and devolves their support 
upon the parents, providing in compensation therefor 
her own sweet and great rewards. Very well, then, let 
us turn to Nature, and read the mandates of justice in 
her law. 

Nature gives to labor; and to labor alone. In a very 
Garden of Eden a man would starve but for human exer- 
tion. Now, here are two men of equal incomes — that of 
the one derived from the exertion of his labor, that 
of the other from the rent of land. Is it just that they 
should equally contribute to the expenses of the state? 
Evidently not. The income of the one represents wealth 
he creates and adds to the general wealth of the state; 
the income of the other represents merely wealth that 
he takes from the general stock, returning nothing. 



418 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY* Book VIIL 

The right of the one to the enjoyment of his income 
rests on the warrant of nature, which returns wealth 
to labor; the right of the other to the enjoyment 
of his income is a mere fictitious right, the creation of 
municipal regulation, which is unknown and unrecog- 
nized by nature. The father who is told that from his 
labor he must support his children must acquiesce, for 
such is the natural decree; but he may justly demand 
that from the income gained by his labor not one penny 
shall be taken, so long as a penny remains of incomes 
which are gained by a monopoly of the natural oppor- 
tunities which Nature offers impartially to all, and in 
which his children have as their birthright an equal 
share. 

Adam Smith speaks of incomes as "enjoyed under the 
protection of the state;" and this is the ground upon 
which the equal taxation of all species of property is 
commonly insisted upon — that it is equally protected by 
the state. The basis of this idea is evidently that the 
enjoyment of property is made possible by the state — 
that there is a value created and maintained by the com- 
munity, which is justly called upon to meet community 
expenses. Now, of what values is this true? Only of 
the value of land. This is a value that does not arise 
until a community is formed, and that, unlike other 
values, grows with the growth of the comm unity 6 It 
exists only as the community exists. Scatter again the 
largest community, and land, now so valuable, would 
have no value at all. With every increase of population 
the value of land rises; with every decrease it fallsc 
This is true of nothing else save of things which, like 
the ownership of land, are in their nature monopolies. 

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just 
and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who re- 
ceive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and 
^pon them in proportion to the benefit they receive c It 



Chap. III. THE CANONS OF TAXATION. 419 

is the taking by the community, for the use of the com- 
munity, of that value which is the creation of the com- 
munity. It is the application of the common property 
to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for 
the needs of the community, then will the equality or- 
dained by nature be attained. No citizen will have an 
advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his 
industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain 
what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor 
get its full reward, and capital its natural return- 



CHAPTER IVc 

INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONSo 

The grounds from which we have drawn the conclu- 
sion that the tax on land values or rent is the best 
method of raising public revenues have been admitted 
expressly or tacitly by all economists of standing, since 
the determination of the nature and law of rent, 

Eicardo says (Chap. X), "a tax on rent would fall 
wholly on landlords, and could not be shifted to any 
class of consumers," for it "would leave unaltered the 
difference between the produce obtained from the least 
productive land in cultivation and that obtained from land 
of every other quality. * * * A tax on rent would not 
discourage the cultivation of fresh land, for such land 
pays no rent and would be untaxed." 

McCulloch (Note XXIV to "Wealth of Nations") de- 
clares that "in a practical point of view taxes on the rent 
of land are among the most unjust and impolitic that 
can be imagined," but he makes this assertion solely on 
the ground of his assumption that it is practically im- 
possible to distinguish in taxation between the sum paid 
for the use of the soil and that paid on account of the 
capital expended upon it. But., supposing that this 
separation could be effected, he admits that the sum 
paid to landlords for the use of the natural powers of 
the soil might be entirely swept away by a tax without 
their having it in their power to throw any portion of 
the burden upon any one else, and without affecting the 
price of produce e 

John Stuart Mill not only admits all this, but expressly 



Chap. IV. INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS. 421 

declares the expediency and justice of a peculiar tax on 
rent, asking what right the landlords have to the acces- 
sion of riches that comes to them from the general 
progress of society without work, risk, or economizing 
on their part, and although he expressly disapproves of 
interfering with their claim to the present value of land, 
he proposes to take the whole future increase as belong- 
ing to society by natural right. 

Mrs. Fawcett, in the little compendium of the writings 
of her husband, entitled "Political Economy for Begin- 
ners," says: "The land tax, whether small or great in 
amount, partakes of the nature of a rent paid by the 
owner of land to the state. In a great part of India the 
land is owned by the government and therefore the land 
tax is rent paid direct to the state. The economic 
perfection of this system of tenure may be readily 
perceived." 

In fact, that rent should, both on grounds of expedi- 
ency and justice, be the peculiar subject of taxation, is 
involved in the accepted doctrine of rent, and may be 
found in embryo in the works of all economists who have 
accepted the law of Kicardo. That these principles have 
not been pushed to their necessary conclusions, as I have 
pushed them, evidently arises from the indisposition to 
endanger or offend the enormous interest involved in 
private ownership in land, and from the false theories in 
regard to wages and the cause of poverty which have 
dominated economic thought. 

But there has been a school of economists who plainly 
perceived, what is clear to the natural perceptions of 
men when uninfluenced by habit — that the revenues of 
the common property, land, ought to be appropriated to 
the common service. The French Economists of the 
last century, headed by Quesnay and Tiirgot, proposed 
just what I have proposed, that all taxation should be 
abolished save a tax upon the value ot- land. As I am 



422 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIJ1 

acquainted with the doctrines of Quesnay and his dis- 
ciples only at second hand through the medium of the 
English writers, I am unable to say how far his peculiar 
ideas as to agriculture being the only productive avoca- 
tion, etc., are erroneous apprehensions, or mere peculiari- 
ties of terminology. But of this I am certain from the 
proposition in which his theory culminated — that he saw 
the fundamental relation between land and labor which 
has since been lost sight of, and that he arrived at prac- 
tical truth, though, it may be, through a course of de- 
fectively expressed reasoning. The causes which leave 
in the hands of the landlord a "produce net" were by 
the Physiocrats no better explained than the suction of 
a pump was explained by the assumption that nature 
abhors a vacuum, but the fact in its practical relations 
to social economy was recognized, and the benefit which 
would result from the perfect freedom given to industry 
and trade by a substitution of a tax on rent for all the 
impositions which hamper and distort the application of 
labor was doubtless as clearly seen by them as it is by 
me. One of the things most to be regretted about the 
French Eevolution is that it overwhelmed the ideas of 
the Economists, just as they were gaining strength 
among the thinking classes, and were apparently about to 
influence fiscal legislation. 

Without knowing anything of Quesnay or his doc- 
trines, I have reached the same practical conclusion by a 
route which cannot be disputed, and have based it on 
grounds which cannot be questioned by the accepted 
political economy. 

The only objection to the tax on rent or land values 
which is to be met with in standard politico-economic 
works is one which concedes its advantages — for it is, 
that from the difficulty of separation, we might, in tax- 
ing the rent of land, tax something else. McCulloch, 
for instance, declares taxes on the rent of land to be 



Chap. 2V. INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS. 4:23 

impolitic and unjust because the return received for the 
natural and inherent powers of the soil cannot be clearly 
distinguished from the return received from improve- 
ments and meliorations, which might thus be discouraged. 
Macaulay somewhere says that if the admission of the 
attraction of gravitation were inimical to any considera- 
ble pecuniary interest, there would not be wanting argu- 
ments against gravitation — a truth of which this objec- 
tion is an illustration. For admitting that it is impossi- 
ble invariably to separate the value of land from the 
value of improvements, is this necessity of continuing to 
tax some improvements any reason why we should con- 
tinue to tax all improvements? If it discourage produc- 
tion to tax values which labor and capital have intimately 
combined with that of land, how much greater dis 
couragement is involved in taxing not only these, but all 
the clearly distinguishable values which labor and capital 
create? 

But, as a matter of fact, the value of land can always 
be readily distinguished from the value of improvements. 
In countries like the United States there is much valua- 
ble land that has never been improved; and in many of 
the States the value of the land and the value of improve- 
ments are habitually estimated separately by the assessors, 
though afterward reunited under the term real estate. Nor 
where ground has been occupied from immemorial times, 
is there any difficulty in getting at the value of the bare 
land, for frequently the land is owned by one person and 
the buildings by another, and when a fire occurs and 
improvements are destroyed, a clear and definite value 
remains in the land. In the oldest country in the world 
no difficulty whatever can attend the separation, if ail 
that be attempted is to separate the value of the clearly 
distinguishable improvements, made within a moderate 
period, from the value of the land, should they be de- 
stroyed. This, manifestly, is all that justice or policy 



424 APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY. Book VIII. 

requires. Absolute accuracy is impossible in any system, 
and to attempt to separate all that the human race has 
done from what nature originally provided would be as 
absurd as impracticable. A swamp drained or a hill 
terraced by the Romans constitutes now as much a part 
of the natural advantages of the British Isles as though 
the work had been done by earthquake or glacier. The 
fact that after a certain lapse of time the value of such 
permanent improvements would be considered as having 
lapsed into that of the land, and would be taxed accord- 
ingly, could have no deterrent effect on such improve- 
ments, for such works are frequently undertaken upon 
leases for years. The fact is, that each generation builds 
and improves for itself, and not for the remote future. 
And the further fact is, that each generation is heir, not 
only to the natural powers of the earth, but to all that 
remains of the work of past generations. 

An objection of a different kind may however be made. 
It may be said that where political power is diffused, it 
is highly desirable that taxation should fall not on one 
class, such as land owners, but on all; in order that all 
who exercise political power may feel a proper interest 
in economical government. Taxation and representa- 
tion, it will be said, cannot safely be divorced. 

But however desirable it may be to combine with polit- 
ical power the consciousness of public burdens, the pres- 
ent system certainly does not secure it. Indirect taxes 
are largely raised from those who pay little or nothing 
consciously. In the United States the class is rapidly 
growing who not only feel no interest in taxation, 
but who have no concern in good government. In our 
large cities elections are in great measure determined 
not by considerations of public interest, but by such in- 
fluences as determined elections in Eome when the masses 
had ceased to care for anything but bread and the circus. 

The effect of substituting for the manifold taxes now 



Chap. IV. INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS. £25 

imposed a single tax on the value of land would hardly 
lessen the number of conscious taxpayers, for the divi- 
sion of land now held on speculation would much increase 
the number of land holders. But it would so equalize 
the distribution of wealth as to raise even the poorest 
above that condition of abject poverty in which public 
considerations have no weight; while it would at the 
same time cut down those overgrown fortunes which 
raise their possessors above concern in government. The 
dangerous classes politically are the very rich and very 
poor. It is not the taxes that he is conscious of paying 
that gives a man a stake in the country, an interest in its 
government; it is the consciousness of feeling that he is 
an integral part of the community; that its prosperity is 
his prosperity, and its disgrace his shame. Let but the 
citizen feel this; let him be surrounded by all the in- 
fluences that spring from and cluster round a comforta- 
ble home, and the community may rely upon him, even 
to limb or to life. Men do not vote patriotically, any more 
than they fight patriotically, because of their payment of 
taxes. Whatever conduces to the comfortable and inde- 
pendent material condition of the masses will best foster 
public spirit, will make the ultimate governing power 
more intelligent and more virtuous. 

But it may be asked: If the tax on land values is so 
advantageous a mode of raising revenue, how is it that 
so many other taxes are resorted to in preference by all 
governments? 

The answer is obvious: The tax on land values is the 
only tax of any importance that does not distribute itself. 
It falls upon the owners of land, and there is no way in 
which they can shift the burden upon any one else. 
Hence, a large and powerful class are directly interested 
in keeping down the tax on land values and substituting, 
as a means for raising the required revenue, taxes on 
other things, just as the land owners of England,, two 



426 , APPLICATION OF THE KEMEDY, Book VIII 

hundred years ago, succeeded in establishing an excise, 
which fell on all consumers, for the dues under the 
feudal tenures, which fell only on them. 

There is, thus, a definite and powerful interest opposed 
to the taxation of land values; but to the other taxes 
upon which modern governments so largely rely there is 
no special opposition. The ingenuity of statesmen has 
been exercised in devising schemes of taxation which 
drain the wages of labor and the earnings of capital as 
the vampire bat is said to suck the lifeblood of its victim. 
Nearly all of these taxes are ultimately paid by that in- 
definable being, the consumer; and he pays them in a 
way which does not call his attention to the fact that he 
is paying a tax — pays them in such small amounts and in 
such insidious modes that he does not notice it, and is 
not likely to take the trouble to remonstrate effectually. 
Those who pay the money directly to the tax collector 
are not only not interested in opposing a tax which they 
so easily shift from their own shoulders, but are very 
frequently interested in its imposition and maintenance, 
as are other powerful interests which profit, or expect to 
profit, by the increase of prices which such taxes bring 
about. 

Nearly all of the manifold taxes by which the people 
of the United States are now burdened have been im- 
posed rather with a view to private advantage than to 
the raising of revenue, and the great obstacle to the 
simplification of taxation is these private interests, whose 
representatives cluster in the lobby whenever a reduction 
of taxation is proposed, to see that the taxes by which 
they profit are not reduced. The fastening of a protec- 
tive tariff upon the United States has been due to these 
influences, and not to the acceptance of absurd theories 
of protection upon their own merits. The large revenue 
which the civil war rendered necessary was the golden 
opportunity of these special interests, and taxes were 



Chap. IV. INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS. 427 

piled up on every possible thing, not so much to raise 
revenue as to enable particular classes to participate 
in the advantages of tax-gathering and tax-pocketing. 
And, since the war, these interested parties have consti- 
tuted the great obstacle to the reduction of taxation; 
those taxes which cost the people least having, for this 
reason, been found easier to abolish than those taxes 
which cost the people most. And, thus, even popular 
governments, which have for their avowed principle the 
securing of the greatest good to the greatest number, 
are, in a most important function, used to secure a ques- 
tionable good to a small number, at the expense of a 
great evil to the many. 

License taxes are generally favored by those on whom 
they are imposed, as they tend to keep others from en- 
tering the business; imposts upon manufactures are 
frequently grateful to large manufacturers for similar 
reasons, as was seen in the opposition of the distillers to 
the reduction of the whisky tax; duties on imports not 
only tend to give certain producers special advantages, 
but accrue to the benefit of importers or dealers who 
have large stocks on hand; and so, in the case of all such 
taxes, there are particular interests, capable of ready 
organization and concerted action, which favor the im- 
position of the tax, while, in the case of a tax upon the 
value of land, there is a solid and sensitive interest stead- 
ily and bitterly to oppose it 

But if once the truth which I am trying to make clear 
is understood by the masses, it is easy to see how a union 
of political forces strong enough to carry it into practice 
becomes possible. 



BOOK IX. 

EFFECTS OF THE EEMEDY. 



CHAPTER I. — OF THE EFFECT UPON THE PRODUCTION OF 

WEALTH. 
CHAPTER II. — OF THE EFFECT UPON DISTRIBUTION AND 

THENCE UPON PRODUCTION. 
CHAPTER III. — OF THE EFFECT UPON INDIVIDUALS AND 

CLASSES. 
CHAPTER IT. — OF THE CHANGES THAT WOULD BE 

WROUGHT IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 

AND SOCIAL LIFE. 



I cannot play upon any stringed instrument; but I can tell you 
how of a little village to make a great and glorious city. — TJiemis- 
tocles 



Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the 
"brier shall come up the myrtle tree. 

And they shall build houses and inhabit them ; and they shall plant 
vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and an- 
other inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat, — Isaiah. 



OHAPTEE I. 

OF THE EFFECT UPON THE PRODUCTION OF WEALTH. 

The elder Mirabeau, we are told, ranked the proposi- 
tion of Quesnay, to substitute one single tax on rent (the 
impot unique) for all other taxes, as a discovery equal 
in utility to the invention of writing or the substitution 
of the use of money for barter. 

To whomsoever will think over the matter, this saying 
will appear an evidence of penetration rather than of ex- 
travagance. The advantages which would be gained by 
substituting for the numerous taxes by which the public 
revenues are now raised, a single tax levied upon the 
value of land, will appear more and more important the 
more they are considered. This is the secret which 
would transform the little village into the great city. 
With all the burdens removed which now oppress indus- 
try and hamper exchange, the production of wealth 
would go on with a rapidity now undreamed of. This,* 
in its turn, would lead to an increase in the value of land 
■ — a new surplus which society might take for general 
purposes. And released from the difficulties which at- 
tend the collection of revenue in a way that begets 
corruption and renders legislation the tool of special 
interests, society could assume functions which the in- 
creasing complexity of life maKes it desirable to assume, 
but which the prospect of political demoralization under 
the present system now leads thoughtful men to shrink 
from. 

Consider the effect upon the production of wealth. 

To abolish the taxation which, acting and reacting, 



432 EFFECTS OF THE KEMEDT Book IX. 

now hampers every wheel of exchange and presses upon 
every form of industry, would be like removing an im- 
mense weight from a powerful spring. Imbued with 
fresh energy, production would start into new life, and 
trade would receive a stimulus which would be felt tc 
the remotest arteries. The present method of taxation 
operates upon exchange like artificial deserts and moun- 
tains; it costs more to get goods through a custom house 
than it does to carry them around the world. It operates 
upon energy, and industry, and skill, and thrift, like a 
fine upon those qualities* If I have worked harder and 
built myself a good house while you have been contented 
to live in a hovel, the tax-gatherer now comes annually 
to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry, 
by taxing me more than you. If 1 have saved while you 
wasted, I am mulct, while you are exempt. If a man 
build a ship we make him pay for his temerity, as though 
he had done an injury to the state; if a railroad be 
opened, down comes the tax-collector upon it, as though 
it were a public nuisance; if a manufactory be erected 
we levy upon it an annual sum which would go far toward 
making a handsome profit. We say we want capital, but 
if any one accumulate it, or bring it among us, we charge 
him for it as though we were giving him a privilege. 
We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields 
with ripening grain; we fine him who puts up machinery, 
>nd him who drains a swamp. How heavily these taxes 
burden production only those realize who have attempted 
to follow our system of taxation through its ramifications, 
for, as I have before said, the heaviest part of taxation 
is that which falls in increased prices. But manifestly 
these taxes are in their nature akin to the Egyptian 
Pasha's tax upon date-trees. If they do not cause the 
trees to be cut down, they at least discourage the 
planting. 

To abolish these taxes would r be to lift the whole enor- 



Chap.L UPON THE PRODUCTION OF WEALTH. 433 

mous weight of taxation from productive industry. The 
needle of the seamstress and the great manufactory; the 
cart-horse and the locomotive; the fishing boat and the 
steamship; the farmer's plow and the merchant's stock, 
would be alike untaxed. All would be free to make or 
to save, to buy or to sell, unfined by taxes, unannoyed 
by the tax-gatherer. Instead of saying to the producer, 
as it does now, "The more you add to the general wealth 
the more shall you be taxed l" the state would say to 
the producer, "Be as industrious, as thrifty, as enter- 
prising as you choose, you shall have your full reward! 
You shall not be fined for making two blades of grass 
grow where one grew before; you shall not be taxed for 
adding to the aggregate wealth e " 

And will not the community gain by thus refusing to 
kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; by thus refrain- 
ing from muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn; 
by thus leaving to industry, and thrift, and skill, their 
natural reward, full and unimpaired? For there is to 
the community also a natural reward. The law of society 
is, each for all, as well as all for each. No one can keep 
to himself the good he may do, any more than he can 
keep the bad* Every productive enterprise, besides its 
return to those who undertake it, yields collateral advan- 
tages to others. If a man plant a fruit-tree, his gain is 
that he gathers the fruit in its time and season c But in 
addition to his gain, there is a gain to the whole com- 
munity. Others than the owner are benefited by the 
increased supply of fruit; the birds which it shelters fly 
far and wide; the rain which it helps to attract falls not 
alone on his field; and, even to the eye which rests upon 
it from a distance, it brings a sense of beauty. And so 
with everything else. The building of a house, a fac- 
tory, a ship, or a railroad, benefits others besides those 
who get the direct profits. Nature laughs at a miser. 
He is like the squirrel who buries his nuts and refrains 



43?- EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX, 

from digging them up again. Lo! they sproufand grow 
into trees. In fine linen, steeped in costly spices, the 
mummy is laid away. Thousands and thousands of years 
thereafter, the Bedouin cooks his food by a fire of its 
encasings, it generates the steam by which the traveler 
is whirled on his way, or it passes into far-off lands to 
gratify the curiosity of another race. The bee fills the 
hollow tree with honey, and along comes the bear or the 
maiic 

Well may the community leave to the individual pro- 
ducer all that prompts him to exertion; well may it let 
the laborer have the full reward of his labor, and the 
capitalist the full return of his capitaL For the more 
that labor and capital produce, the greater grows the 
common wealth in which all may share. And in the 
value or rent of land is this general gain expressed in a 
definite and concrete form Here is a fund which the 
state may take while leaving to labor and capital their 
full reward. With increased activity of production this 
would commensurately increase. 

And to shift the burden of taxation from production 
and exchange to the value or rent of land would not 
merely be to give new stimulus to the production of 
wealth; it would be to open new opportunities. For 
under this system no one would care to hold land unless 
to use it, and land now withheld from use would every- 
where be thrown open to improvement. 

The selling price of land would fall; land speculation 
would receive its death blow; land monopolization would 
no longer pay. Millions and millions o f acres from 
which settlers are now shut out by high prices would 
be abandoned by their present owners or sold to set- 
tlers upon nominal terms. And this not merely on 
the frontiers, but within what are now considered well 
settled districts. Within a hundred miles of San Fran- 
cisco would be thus thrown open land enough to support- 



Chap. I UPON" THE PRODUCTION OF WEALTH. 435 

even with present modes of cultivation, an agricultural 
population equal to that now scattered from the Oregon 
boundary to the Mexican line — a distance of 800 miles. 
In the same degree would this be true of most of the 
Western States, and in a great degree of the older Eastern 
States, for even in New York and Pennsylvania is popula- 
tion yet sparse as compared with the capacity of the land. 
And even in densely populated England would such a 
policy throw open to cultivation many hundreds of thou- 
sands of acres now held as private parks, deer preserves, 
and shooting grounds. 

For this simple device of placing all taxes on the value 
of land would be in effect putting up the land at auction 
to whomsoever would pay the highest rent to the state. 
The demand for land fixes its value,and hence, if taxes were 
placed so as very nearly to consume that value, the man 
who wished to hold land without using it would have so 
pay very nearly what it would be worth to any one who 
wanted to use it. 

And it must be remembered that this would apply, not 
merely to agricultural land, but to all land. Mineral 
land would be thrown open to use, just as agricultural 
land; and in the heart of a city no one could afford to 
keep land from its most profitable use, or on the out- 
skirts to demand more for it than the use to which it 
could at the time be put would warrant. Everywhere 
that land had attained a value, taxation, instead of 
operating, as now, as a fine upon improvement, would 
operate to force improvementc Whoever planted an 
orchard, or sowed a field, or built a house, or erected a 
manufactory, no matter how costly, would have no more 
to pay in taxes than if he kept so much land idle. The 
monopolist of agricultural land would be taxed as much 
as though his land were covered with houses and barns, 
with crops and with stock. The owner of a vacant city 
lot would have to pay as much for the privilege of keep- 



436 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Booh JX 

ing other people off of it until he wanted to use it, as 
his neighbor who has a fine house upon his lot. It would 
cost as much to keep a row of tumble-down shanties 
upon valuable land as though it were covered with a 
grand hotel or a pile of great warehouses filled with 
costly goods. 

Thus, the bonus that wherever labor is most produc- 
tive must now be paid before labor can be exerted would 
disappear. The farmer would not have to pay out half 
his means, or mortgage his labor for years, in order to 
obtain land to cultivate; the builder of a city homestead 
would not have to lay out as much for a small lot as for 
the house he puts upon it; the company that proposed to 
erect a manufactory would not have to expend a great 
part of their capital for a site. And what would be paid 
from year to year to the state would be in lieu of all 
the taxes now levied upon improvements, machinery, and 
stock. 

Consider the effect of such a change upon the labor 
market. Competition would no longer be one-sided, as 
now. Instead of laborers competing with each other for 
employment, and in their competition cutting down 
wages to the point of bare subsistence, employers would 
everywhere be competing for laborers, and wages would 
rise to the fair earnings of labor. For into the labor 
market would have entered the greatest of all competi- 
tors for the employment of labor, a competitor whose 
demand cannot be satisfied until want is satisfied — the 
demand of labor itself. The employers of labor would 
not have merely to bid against other employers, all feel- 
ing the stimulus of greater trade and increased profits, 
but against the ability of laborers to become their own 
employers upon the natural opportunities freely opened 
to them by the tax which prevented monopolization. 

With natural opportunities thus free to labor; with 
capital and improvements exempt from tax, and exchange 



chap.i. upon the production of wealth. 437 

released from restrictions, the spectacle of willing men 
unable to turn their labor into the things they are suffer- 
ing for would become impossible; the recurring parox 
ysms which paralyze industry would cease; every wheel of 
production would be set in motion; demand would keep 
pace with supply, and supply with demand; trade would 
increase in every direction, and wealth augment on every 
hand. 



CHAPTER II. 

OF THE EFFECT UPON DISTRIBUTION AND THENCE UPON 

PRODUCTION. 

But great as they thus appear, the advantages of a trans- 
ference of all public burdens to a tax upon the value of 
land cannot be fully appreciated until we consider the 
effect upon the distribution of wealth. 

Tracing out the cause of the unequal distribution of 
wealth which appears in all civilized countries, with a 
constant tendency to greater and greater inequality as 
material progress goes on, we have found it in the fact 
that, as civilization advances, the ownership of land, 
now in private hands, gives a greater and greater power 
of appropriating the wealth produced by labor and capital. 

Thus, to relieve labor and capital from all taxation, 
direct and indirect, and to throw the burden upon rent, 
would be, as far as it went, to counteract this tendency 
to inequality, and, if it went so far as to take in taxation 
the whole of rent, the cause of inequality would be to- 
tally destroyed. Eent, instead of causing inequality, as 
now, would then promote equality. Labor and capital 
would then receive the whole produce, minus that portion 
taken by the state in the taxation of land values, which, 
being applied to public purposes, would be equally dis- 
tributed in public benefits. 

That is to say, the wealth produced in every commu- 
nity would be divided into two portions. One part would 
be distributed in wages and interest between individual 
producers, according to the part each had taken in the 
work of production; the other part would go to the com- 
munity as a whole, to be distributed in public benefits to 



Chap.n. UPON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 439 

all its members. In this all would share equally — the 
weak with the strong, young children and decrepit old 
men, the maimed, the halt, and the blind, as well as the 
vigorous. And justly so — for while one part represents 
the result of individual effort in production, the other 
represents the increased power with which the commu- 
nity as a whole aids the individual. 

Thus, as material progress tends to increase rent, were 
rent taken by the community for common purposes the 
very cause which now tends to produce inequality as 
material progress goes on would then tend to produce 
greater and greater equality. Fully to understand this 
effect, let us revert to principles previously worked out. 

We have seen that wages and interest must everywhere 
be fixed by the rent line or margin of cultivation — that 
is to say, by the reward which labor and capital can 
secure on land for which no rent is paid; that the aggre- 
gate amount of wealth, which the aggregate of labor and 
capital employed in production will receive, will be the 
amount of wealth produced (or rather, when we consider 
taxes, the net amount), minus what is taken as rent. 

We have seen that with material progress, as it is at 
present going on, there is a twofold tendency to the ad- 
vance of rent. Both are to the increase of the proportion 
of the wealth produced which goes as rent, and to the 
decrease of the proportion which goes as wages and in- 
terest. But the first, or natural tendency, which results 
from the laws of social development, is to the increase of 
rent as a quantity, without the reduction of wages and 
interest as quantities, or even with their quantitative 
increase. The other tendency, which results from the 
unnatural appropriation of land to private ownership, is 
to the increase of rent as a quantity by the reduction of 
wages and interest as quantities. 

Now, it is evident that to take rent in taxation for 
public purposes, which virtually abolishes private owner- 



£40 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX 

ship in land, would be to destroy the tendency to an 
absolute decrease in wages and interest, by destroying 
the speculative monopolization of land and the specula- 
tive increase in rent. It would be very largely to in- 
crease wages and interest, by throwing open natural 
opportunities now monopolized and reducing the price 
of land. Labor and capital would thus not merely gain 
what is now taken from them in taxation, but would gain 
by the positive decline in rent caused by the decrease in 
speculative land values. A new equilibrium would be 
established, at which the common rate of wages and in- 
terest would be much higher than now. 

But this new equilibrium established, further advances 
in productive power, and the tendency in this direction 
would be greatly accelerated, would result in still in- 
creasing rent, not at the expense of wages and interest, 
but by new gains in production, which, as rent would be 
taken by the community for public uses, would accrue to 
the advantage of every member of the community. 
Thus, as material progress went on, the condition of the 
masses would constantly improve. Not merely one class 
would become richer, but all would become richer; not 
merely one class would have more of the necessaries, 
conveniences, and elegancies of life, but all would have 
more. For, the increasing power of production, which 
comes with increasing population, with every new dis- 
covery in the productive arts, with every labor-saving 
invention, with every extension and facilitation of ex- 
changes, could be monopolized by none. That part of 
the benefit which did not go directly to increase the re- 
ward of labor and capital would go to the state — that is 
to say, to the whole community. With all the enormous 
advantages, material and mental, of a dense population, 
would be united the freedom and equality that can now 
be found only in new and sparsely settled districts. 

And, then, consider how equalization in the distribu- 



Chap. II. UPON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 441 

tion of wealth would react upon production, everywhere 
preventing waste, everywhere increasing power. 

If it were possible to express in figures the direct 
pecuniary loss which society suffers from the social mal- 
adjustments which condemn large classes to poverty and 
vice, the estimate would be appalling. England main- 
tains over a million paupers on official charity; the city 
of New York alone spends over seven million dollars a 
year in a similar way. But what is spent from public 
funds, what is spent by charitable societies and what is 
spent in individual charity, would, if aggregated, be but 
the first and smallest item in the account. The potential 
earnings of the labor thus going to waste, the cost of the 
reckless, improvident and idle habits thus generated; the 
pecuniary loss, to consider nothing more, suggested by 
the appalling statistics of mortality, and especially infant 
mortality, among the poorer classes; the waste indicated 
by the gin palaces or low groggeries which increase as 
poverty deepens; the damage done by the vermin of 
society that are bred of poverty and destitution — the 
thieves, prostitutes, beggars, and tramps; the cost of 
guarding society against them, are all items in the sum 
which the present unjust and unequal distribution of 
wealth takes from the aggregate which, with present 
means of production, society might enjoy. Nor yet shall 
we have completed the account. The ignorance and 
vice, the recklessness and immorality engendered by the 
inequality in the distribution of wealth show themselves 
in the imbecility and corruption of government; and 
the waste of public revenues, and the still greater waste 
involved in the ignorant and corrupt abuse of public 
powers and functions, are their legitimate consequences. 

But the increase in wages, and the opening of new 
avenues of employment which would result from the 
appropriation of rent to public purposes, would not 
merely stop these wastes and relieve society of these 



442 , EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book JX 

enormous losses; new power would be added to labor. 
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its 
wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, 
the world over. 

What is remarked between the efficiency of labor in 
the agricultural districts of England where different 
rates of wages prevail; what Brassey noticed as between 
the work done by his better paid English navvies and that 
done by the worse paid labor of the continent; what was 
evident in the United States as between slave labor and 
free labor; what is seen by the astonishing number of 
mechanics or servants required in India or China to get 
anything done, is universally true. The efficiency of 
labor always increases with the habitual wages of labor — 
for high wages mean increased self-respect, intelligence, 
hope, and energy. Man is not a machine, that will do 
so much and no more; he is not an animal, whose powers 
may reach thus far and no further. It is mind, not 
muscle, which is the great agent of production. The 
physical power evolved in the human frame is one of 
the weakest of forces, but for the human intelligence 
the resistless currents of nature flow, and matter be- 
comes plastic to the human will; To increase the com- 
forts, and leisure, and independence of the masses is to 
increase their intelligence; it is to bring the brain to the 
aid of the hand; it is to engage in the common work of 
life the faculty which measures the animalcule and traces 
the orbits of the stars! 

Who can say to what infinite powers the wealth-pro- 
ducing capacity of labor may not be raised by social 
adjustments which will give to the producers of wealth 
their fair proportion of its advantages and enjoyments! 
With present processes the gain would be simply incal- 
culable, but just as wages are high, so do the invention 
and utilization of improved processes and machinery go 
on with greater rapidity and ease. That the wheat crops 



Chap. II. UPON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 443 

of Southern Kussia are still reaped with the scythe and 
beaten out with the flail is simply because wages are 
there so low. American invention, American aptitude 
for labor-saving processes and machinery are the result 
of the comparatively high wages that have prevailed in 
the United States. Had our producers been condemned 
to the low reward of the Egyptian fellah or Chinese 
coolie, we would be drawing water by hand and trans- 
porting goods on the shoulders of men. The increase 
in the reward of labor and capital would still further 
stimulate invention and hasten the adoption of improved 
processes, and these would truly appear, what in them- 
selves they really are— an unmixed good. The injurious 
effects of labor-saving machinery upon the w T orking 
classes, that are now so often apparent, and that, in 
spite of all argument, make so many people regard 
machinery as an evil instead of a blessing, would disap- 
pear. Every new power engaged in the service of man 
would improve the condition of all. And from the gen- 
eral intelligence and mental activity springing from this 
general improvement of condition would come new de- 
velopments of power of which we as yet cannot dream. 

But I shall not deny, and do not wish to lose sight of 
che fact, that while thus preventing waste and thus add- 
ing to the efficiency of labor, the equalization in the dis- 
tribution of wealth that would result from the simple 
plan of taxation that I propose, must lessen the intensity 
with which wealth is pursued. It seems to me that in a 
condition of society in which no one need fear poverty, 
no one would desire great wealth — at least, no one would 
take the trouble to strive and to strain for it as men do 
now. For, certainly, the spectacle of men who have only 
a few years to live, slaving away their time for the sake 
of dying rich, is in itself so unnatural and absurd, that 
in a state of society where the abolition of the fear of 
want had dissipated the envious admiration with which 



444 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX. 

the masses of men now regard the possession of great 
riches, whoever would toil to acquire more than he cared 
to use would be looked upon as we would now look on a 
man who would thatch his head with half a dozen hats, 
or walk around in the hot sun with an overcoat on. 
When every one is sure of being able to get enough, no 
one will care to make a pack-horse of himself. 

And though this incentive to production be with- 
drawn, can we not spare it? Whatever may have been 
its office in an earlier stage of development, it is not 
needed now. The dangers that menace our civilization 
do not come from the weakness of the springs of produc- 
tion. What it suffers from, and what, if a remedy be 
not applied, it must die from, is unequal distribution! 

Nor would the removal of this incentive, regarded 
only from the standpoint of production, be an unmixed 
loss. For, that the aggregate of production is greatly 
reduced by the greed with which riches are pursued, is 
one of the most obtrusive facts of modern society. 
While, were this insane desire to get rich at any cost 
lessened, mental activities now devoted to scraping to- 
gether riches would be translated into far higher spheres 
of usef ulness. 



CHAPTER ill. 

OJ THE EFFECT UPON INDIVIDUALS AND CLASSES. 

When it is first proposed to put all taxes upon the 
value of land, and thus confiscate rent, all land holders 
are likely to take the alarm, and there will not be want- 
ing appeals to the fears of small farm and homestead 
owners, who will be told that this is a proposition to rob 
them of their hard-earned property. But a moment's 
reflection will show that this proposition should com- 
mend itself to all whose interests as land holders do not 
largely exceed their interests as laborers or capitalists, 
or both. And further consideration will show that 
though the large land holders may lose relatively, yet 
even in their case there will be an absolute gain. For, 
the increase in production will be so great that labor and 
capital will gain very much more than will be lost to 
private land ownership, while in these gains, and in the 
greater ones involved in a more healthy social condition, 
the whole community, including the land owners them- 
selves, will share. 

In a preceding chapter I have gone over the question 
of what is due to the present land holders, and have 
shown that they have no claim to compensation. But 
there is still another ground on which we may dismiss all 
idea of compensation. They will not really be injured. 

It is manifest, of course, that the change I propose 
will greatly benefit all those who live by wages, whether 
of hand or of head — laborers, operatives, mechanics, 
clerks, professional men of all sorts. It is manifest, 
also, that it will benefit all those who live partly by wages 



446 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX. 

and partly by the earnings of their capital — storekeepers, 
merchants, manufacturers, employing or undertaking 
producers and exchangers of all sorts — from the peddler 
or drayman to the railroad or steamship owner — and it 
is likewise manifest that it will increase the incomes of 
those whose incomes are drawn from the earnings of 
capital, or from investments other than in lands, save 
perhaps the holders of government bonds or other securi- 
ties bearing fixed rates of interest, which will probably 
depreciate in selling value, owing to the rise in the gen- 
eral rate of interest, though the income from them will 
remain the same. 

Take, now, the case of the homestead owner — the 
mechanic, storekeeper, or professional man who has 
secured himself a house and lot, where he lives, and 
which he contemplates with satisfaction as a place from 
which his family cannot be ejected in case of his death. 
He will not be injured; on the contrary, he will be the 
gainer. The selling value of his lot will diminish — 
theoretically it will entirely disappear. But its useful- 
nes to him will not disappear. It will serve his purpose 
as well as ever. While, as the value of all other lots will 
diminish or disappear in the same ratio, he retains the 
same security of always having a lot that he had before. 
That is to say, he is a loser only as the man who has 
bought himself a pair of boots may be said to be a loser 
by a subsequent fall in the price of boots. His boots 
will be just as useful to him, and the next pair of boots 
he can get cheaper. So, to the homestead owner, his lot 
will be as useful, and should he look forward to getting 
a larger lot, or having his children, as they grow up, 
get homesteads of their own, he will, even in the matter 
of lots, be the gainer. And in the present, other things 
considered, he will be much the gainer. For though he 
will have more taxes to pay upon his land, he will be re- 
leased from taxes upon his house and improvements, 



Chap. HI. UPON INDIVIDUALS AND CLASSES. 44? 

upon his furniture and personal property, upon all that 
he and his family eat, drink, and wear, while his earn- 
ings will be largely increased by the rise of wages, the 
constant employment, and the increased briskness of 
trade. His only loss will be, if he wants to sell his lot 
without getting another, and this will be a small loss 
compared with the great gain, 

And so with the farmer. I speak not now of the 
farmers who never touch the handles of a plow, who cul- 
tivate thousands of acres and enjoy incomes like those of 
the rich Southern planters before the war; but of the 
working farmers who constitute such a large class in the 
United States — men who own small farms, which they 
cultivate with the aid of their boys, and perhaps some 
hired help, and who in Europe would be called peasant 
proprietors. Paradoxical as it may appear to these men 
until they understand the full bearings of the proposi- 
tion, of all classes above that of the mere laborer they 
have most to gain by placing all taxes upon the value 
of land. That they do not now get as good a living as 
their hard work ought to give them, they generally feel, 
though they may not be able to trace the cause. The 
fact is that taxation, as now levied, falls on them with 
peculiar severity. They are taxed on all their improve- 
ments — houses, barns, fences, crops, stock. The per- 
sonal property which they have cannot be as readily con- 
cealed or undervalued as can the more valuable kinds 
which are concentrated in the cities. They are not only 
taxed on personal property and improvements, which the 
owners of unused land escape, but their land is generally 
taxed at a higher rate than land held on speculation, 
simply because it is improved. But further than this, 
all taxes imposed on commodities, and especially the 
taxes which, like our protective duties, are imposed with 
a view of raising the prices of commodities, fall on the 
farmer without mitigation. For in a country like the 



448 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book 2Z 

United States, which exports agricultural produce, Ine 
farmer cannot be protected. Whoever gains, he must 
lose. Some years ago the Free Trade League of N^w 
York published a broadside containing cuts of various 
articles of necessity marked with the duties imposed by 
the tariff, and which read something in this wise: "The 
farmer rises in the morning and draws on his pantaloons 
taxed 40 per cent, and his boots taxed 30 per cent., strik- 
ing a light with a match taxed 200 per cent./' and so on, 
following him through the day and through life, until, 
killed by taxation, he is lowered into the grave with a 
rope taxed 45 per cent. This is but a graphic illustra- 
tion of the manner in which such taxes ultimately fall. 
The farmer would be a great gainer by the substitution 
of a single tax upon the value of land for all these taxes, 
for the taxation of land values would fall with greatest 
weight, not upon the agricultural districts, where land 
values are comparatively small, but upon the towns and 
cities where land values are high; whereas taxes upon 
personal property and improvements fall as heavily in 
the country as in the city. And in sparsely settled dis- 
tricts there would be hardly any taxes at all for the 
farmer to pay. For taxes, being levied upon the value 
of the bare land, would fall as heavily upon unimproved 
as upon improved land. Acre for acre, the improved 
and cultivated farm, with its buildings, fences, orchard, 
crops, and stock could be taxed no more than unused 
land of equal quality. The result would be that specu- 
lative values would be kept down, and that cultivated and 
improved farms would have no taxes to pay until the 
country around them had been well settled. In fact, 
paradoxical as it may at first seem to them, the effect of 
putting all taxation upon the value of land would be to 
relieve the harder working farmers of all taxation. 

But the great gain of the working farmer can be seen 
only when the effect upon the distribution of population 



Chap. Ill UPOtf INDIVIDUALS AND CLASSES. 449 

is considered. The destruction of speculative land 
values would tend to diffuse population where it is too 
dense and to concentrate it where it is too sparse; to 
substitute for the tenement house, homes surrounded by 
gardens, and fully to settle agricultural districts before 
people were driven far from neighbors to look for land. 
The people of the cities would thus get more of the pure 
air and sunshine of the country, the people of the coun- 
try more of the economies and social life of the city. If, 
as is doubtless the case, the application of machinery 
tends to large fields, agricultural population will assume 
the primitive form and cluster in villages. The life of 
the average farmer is now unnecessarily dreary. He is 
not only compelled to work early and late, but he is cut 
off by the sparseness of population from the conveniences, 
the amusements, the educational facilities, and the social 
and intellectual opportunities that come with the closer 
contact of man with man. He would be far better off in 
all these respects, and his labor would be far more pro- 
ductive, if he and those around him held no more land 
than they wanted to use.* While his children, as they 
grew up, would neither be so impelled to seek the excite- 
ment of a city nor would they be driven so far away to 
seek farms of their own. Their means of living would 
be in their own hands, and at home. 

In short, the working farmer is both a laborer and a 
capitalist, as well as a land owner, and it is by his labor 

* Besides the enormous increase in the productive power of labor 
which would result from the better distribution of population, there 
would be also a similar economy in the productive power of land. 
The concentration of population in cities fed by the exhaustive cul- 
tivation of large, sparsely populated areas, results in a literal drain- 
ing into the sea of the elements of fertility. How enormous this 
waste is may be seen from the calculations that have been made as 
to the sewage of our cities, and its practical result is to oe seen in the 
diminishing productiveness of agriculture in large sections. In a 
great part of the United States we are steadily exhausting our lands. 



450 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX. 

and capital that his living is made. His loss would be 
nominal; his gain would be real and great. 

In varying degrees is this true of all land holders. 
Many land holders are laborers of one sort or another. 
And it would be hard to find a land owner not a laborer, 
who is not also a capitalist — while the general rule is, 
that the larger the land owner the greater the capitalist. 
So true is this that in common thought the characters 
are confounded. Thus to put all taxes on the value of 
land, while it would be largely to reduce all great for- 
tunes, would in no case leave the rich man penniless. 
The Duke of Westminster, who owns a considerable part 
of the site of London, is probably the richest land owner* 
in the world. To take all his ground rents by taxation 
would largely reduce his enormous income, but would 
still leave him his buildings and all the income from 
them, and doubtless much personal property in various 
other shapes. He would still have all he could by any 
possibility enjoy, and a much better state of society in 
which to enjoy it. 

So would the Astors of New York remain very rich. 
And so, I think, it will be seen throughout — this measure 
would make no one poorer but such as could be made a 
great deal poorer without being really hurt. It would 
cut down great fortunes, but it would impoverish no one. 

Wealth would not only be enormously increased; it 
would be equally distributed. I do not mean that each 
individual would get the same amount of wealth. That 
would not be equal distribution, so long as different 
individuals have different powers and different desires. 
But I mean that wealth would be distributed in accord- 
ance with the degree in which the industry, skill, knowl- 
edge, or prudence of each contributed to the common 
stock. The great cause which concentrates wealth in 
the hands of those who do not produce, and takes it 
from the hands of those who do, would be gone. The 



Chap.IIL UPON INDIVIDUALS AND CLASSES. 451 

inequalities that continued to exist would be those of na- 
ture, not the artificial inequalities produced by the denial 
of natural law. The non-producer would no longer roll 
in luxury while the producer got but the barest necessi- 
ties of animal existence. 

The monopoly of the land gone, there need be no fear 
of large fortunes. For then the riches of any individual 
must consist of wealth, properly so-called — of wealth, 
which is the product of labor, and which constantly 
tends to dissipation, for national debts, I imagine, would 
not long survive the abolition of the system from which 
they spring. All fear of great fortunes might be dis- 
missed, for when every one gets what he fairly earns, no 
one can get more than he fairly earns. How many men 
are there who fairly earn a million dollars? 



CHAPTER IV. 

OF THE CHANGES THAT WOULD BE WROUGHT IN SOCIAL 
ORGANIZATION AND SOCIAL LIFE. 

We are dealing only with general principles. There 
are some matters of detail — such as those arising from 
the division of revenues between local and general gov- 
ernments — which upon application of these principles 
would come up, but these it is not necessary here to dis- 
cuss. When once principles are settled, details will be 
readily adjusted. 

Nor without too much elaboration is it possible to 
notice all the changes which would be wrought, or would 
become possible, by a change which would readjust the 
very foundation of society, but to some main features let 
me call attention. 

Noticeable among these is the great simplicity which 
would become possible in government. To collect taxes, 
to prevent and punish evasions, to check and counter- 
check revenues drawn from so many distinct sources, 
now make up probably three-fourths, perhaps seven- 
eighths of the business of government, outside of the 
preservation of order, the maintenance of the military 
arm, and the administration of justice. An immense 
and complicated network of governmental machinery 
would thus be dispensed with. 

In the administration of justice there would be a like 
saving of strain. Much of the civil business of our 
courts arises from disputes as to ownership of land. 
These would cease when the state was virtually acknowl- 
edged as the sole owner of land, and all occupiers became 



Chap. IV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 453 

practically rent-paying tenants. The growth of morality 
consequent upon the cessation of want would tend to a 
like diminution in other civil business of the courts, 
which could be hastened by the adoption of the common 
sense proposition of Bentham to abolish all laws for the 
collection of debts and the enforcement of private con- 
tracts. The rise of wages, the opening of opportunities 
for all to make an easy and comfortable living, would at 
once lessen and would soon eliminate from society the 
thieves, swindlers, and other classes of criminals who 
spring from the unequal distribution of wealth. Thus 
the administration of the criminal law, with all its parar 
phernalia of policemen, detectives, prisons, and peniten- 
tiaries, would, like the administration of the civil law, 
cease to make such a drain upon the vital force and atten- 
tion of society. We should get rid, not only of many 
judges, bailiffs, clerks and prison keepers, but of the 
great host of lawyers who are now maintained at the 
expense of producers; and talent now wasted in legal 
subtleties would be turned to higher pursuits. 

The legislative, judicial, and executive functions of 
government would in this way be vastly simplified. Nor 
can I think that the public debts and the standing 
armies, which are historically the outgrowth of the 
change from feudal to allodial tenures, would long re- 
main after the reversion to the old idea that the land of 
a country is the common right of the people of the coun- 
try. The former could readily be paid off by a tax that 
would not lessen the wages of labor nor check produc- 
tion, and the latter the growth of intelligence and inde- 
pendence among the masses, aided, perhaps, by the prog- 
ress of invention, which is revolutionizing the military 
art, must soon cause to disappear. 

Society would thus approach the ideal of Jeffersonian 
democracy, the promised land of Herbert Spencer, the 
abolition of government. But of government only as a 



454 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Booh IX. 

directing and repressive power. It would at the same 
time, and in the same degree, become possible for it to 
realize the dream of socialism. All this simplification 
and abrogation of the present functions of government 
would make possible the assumption of certain other 
functions which are now pressing for recognition. Gov- 
ernment could take upon itself the transmission of mes- 
sages by telegraph, as well as by mail; of building and 
operating railroads, as well as of opening and maintain- 
ing common roads. With present functions so simplified 
and reduced, functions such as these could be assumed 
without danger or strain, and would be under the super- 
vision of public attention, which is now distracted. 
There would be a great and increasing surplus revenue 
from the taxation of land values, for material progress, 
which would go on with greatly accelerated rapidity, 
would tend constantly to increase rent. This revenue 
arising from the common property could be applied to 
the common benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. 
We might not establish public tables — they would be un- 
necessary; but we could establish public baths, museums, 
libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music and dancing 
halls, theaters, universities, technical schools, shooting 
galleries, play grounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light, 
and motive power, as well as water, might be conducted 
through our streets at public expense; our roads be lined 
with fruit trees; discoverers and inventors rewarded, 
scientific investigations supported; and in a thousand 
ways the public revenues made to foster efforts for the 
public benefit. We should reach the ideal of the social- 
ist, but not through governmental repression. Govern- 
ment would change its character, and would become the 
administration of a great co-operative society. It would 
become merely the agency by which the common property 
was administered for the common benefit. 
Does this seem impracticable? Consider for a moment 



Chap. IV, UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 455 

the vast changes that would be wrought in social life by 
a change which would assure to labor its full reward; 
which would banish want and the fear of want; and give 
to the humblest freedom to develop in natural symmetry. 

In thinking of the possibilities of social organization, 
we are apt to assume that greed is the strongest of human 
motives, and that systems of administration can be safely 
based only upon the idea that the fear of punishment is 
necessary to keep men honest — that selfish interests are 
always stronger than general interests. Nothing could 
be further from the truth. 

From whence springs this lust for gain, to gratify 
which men tread everything pure and noble under their 
feet; to which they sacrifice all the higher possibilities 
of life; which converts civility into a hollow pretense, 
patriotism into a sham, and religion into hypocrisy; 
which makes so much of civilized existence an Ishma- 
elitish warfare, of which the weapons are cunning and 
fraud? 

Does it not spring from the existence of want? Carlyle 
somewhere says that poverty is the hell of which the 
modern Englishman is most afraid. And he is right. 
Poverty is the open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns 
beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough. The 
Vedarf declare no truer thing than when the wise crow 
Bushanda tells the eagle-bearer of Vishnu that the keen- 
est pain is in poverty. For poverty is not merely dep- 
rivation; it means shame, degradation; the searing of 
the most sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature as 
with hot irons; the denial of the strongest impulses and 
the sweetest affections; the wrenching of the most vital 
nerves. You love your wife, you love your children; 
but would it not be easier to see them die than to see 
thorn reduced to the pinch of want in which large classes 
in tfvery highly civilized community live? The strong- 
est of animal passions is that with which we cling to life. 



456 EFFECTS OF THE KEMEDY. Book IX 

but it is an everyday occurrence in civilized societies for 
men to put poison to their mouths or pistols to their 
heads from fear of poverty, and for one who does this 
there are probably a hundred who have the desire, but 
are restrained by instinctive shrinking, by religious con* 
siderations, or by family ties e 

From this hell of poverty, it is but natural that men 
should make every effort to escape. With the impulse- 
to self-preservation and self-gratification combine noblei 
feelings, and love as well as fear urges in the struggle. 
Many a man does a mean thing, a dishonest thing, 3 
greedy and grasping and unjust thing, in the effort ta 
place above want, or the fear of want, mother or wife on 
children. 

And out of this condition of things arises a public 
opinion which enlists, as an impelling power in the 
struggle to grasp and to keep, one of the strongest — ■ 
perhaps with many men the very strongest— springs of 
human action. The desire for approbation, the feeling 
that urges us to win the respect, admiration, or sym- 
pathy of our fellows, is instinctive and universal. Dis- 
torted sometimes into the most abnormal manifestations, 
it may yet be everywhere perceived. It is potent with 
the veriest savage, as with the most highly cultivated 
member of the most polished society; it shows itself with 
the first gleam of intelligence, and persists to the last 
breath. It triumphs over the love of ease, over the sense 
of pain, over the dread of death. It dictates the most 
trivial and the most important actions. 

The child just beginning to toddle or to talk will make 
new efforts as its cunning little tricks excite attention 
and laughter; the dying master of the world gathers his 
robes around him, that he may pass away as becomes a 
king; Chinese mothers will deform their daughters' feet 
by cruel stocks, European women will sacrifice their own 
comfort and the comfort of their families to similar 



Vhap.IV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 45? 

dictates of fashion; the Polynesian, that he may excite 
admiration by his beautiful tattoo, will hold himself still 
while his flesh is torn by sharks' teeth; the North Ameri- 
can Indian, tied to the stake, will bear the most fiendish 
tortures without a moan, and, that he may be respected 
and admired as a great brave, will taunt his tormentors 
to new cruelties. It is this that leads the forlorn hope; 
it is this that trims the lamp of the pale student; it is 
this that impels men to strive, to strain, to toil, and to 
die. It is this that raised the pyramids and that fired 
the Ephesian dome. 

Now, men admire what they desire. How sweet to 
the storm-stricken seems the safe harbor; food to the 
hungry, drink to the thirsty, warmth to the shivering, 
rest to the weary, power to the weak, knowledge to him 
in whom the intellectual yearnings of the soul have been 
aroused. And thus the sting of want and the fear of 
want make men admire above all things the possession of 
riches, and to become wealthy is to become respected, 
and admired, and influential. Get money — honestly, if 
you can, but at any rate get money! This is the lesson 
that society is daily and hourly dinning in the ears of its 
members. Men instinctively admire virtue and truth, 
but the sting of want and the fear of want make them 
even more strongly admire the rich and sympathize with 
the fortunate. It is well to be honest and just, and men 
will commend it; but he who by fraud and injustice gets 
him a million dollars will have more respect, and admira- 
tion, and influence, more eye service and lip service, if 
not heart service, than he who refuses it. The one may 
have his reward in the future; he may know that his 
name is writ in the Book of Life, and that for him is the 
white robe and the palm branch of the victor against 
temptation; but the other has his reward in the present. 
His name is writ in the list of "our substantial citizens;" 
%e has the courtship of men and the flattery of women; 



458 EFFECTS OF THE KEMEDY. Booh IX. 

the best pew in the church and the personal regard of 
the eloquent clergyman who in the name of Christ 
preaches the Gospel of Dives, and tones down into a 
meaningless flower of Eastern speech the stern metaphor 
of the camel and the needless eye„ He may be a patron 
of arts, a Maecenas to men of letters; may profit by the 
converse of the intelligent, and be polished by the attri- 
tion of the refinedo His alms may feed the poor, and 
help the struggling, and bring sunshine into desolate 
places; and noble public institutions commemorate, after 
he is gone,, his name and his fame. It is not in the 
guise of a hideous monster, with horns and tail, that 
Satan tempts the children of men, but as an angel of 
light. His promises are not alone of the kingdoms of 
the world, but of mental and moral principalities and 
powers. He appeals not only to the animal appetites, but 
to the cravings that stir in man because he is more than 
an animal. 

Take the case of those miserable "men with muck- 
rakes," who are to be seen in every community as plainly 
as Bunyan saw their type in his vision — who, long after 
they have accumulated wealth enough to satisfy every 
desire, go on working, scheming, striving to add riches 
to riches. It was the desire "to be something;" nay, in 
many cases, the desire to do noble and generous deeds, 
that started them on a career of money getting. And 
what compels them to it long after every possible need 
is satisfied, what urges them still with unsatisfied and 
ravenous greed, is not merely the force of tyrannous 
habit, but the subtler gratifications which the possession 
of riches gives — the sense of power and influence, the 
sense of being looked up to and respected, the sense that 
their wealth not merely raises them above want, but 
makes them men of mark in the community in which 
they live. It is this that makes the rich man so loath to 
part with his money, so anxious to get more. 



Chap. IV. UPON SOCIAL 0KGANIZATI03T AND LIFE. 459 

Against temptations that thus appeal to the strongest 
impulses of our nature, the sanctions of law and the pre- 
cepts of religion can effect but little; and the wonder is, 
not that men are so self-seeking, but that they are not 
much more so. That under present circumstances men 
are not more grasping, more unfaithful, more selfish 
than they are, proves the goodness and fruitfulness of 
human nature, the ceaseless flow of the perennial foun- 
tains from which its moral qualities are fed, All of us 
have mothers; most of us have children, and so faith, 
and purity, and unselfishness can never be utterly ban- 
ished from the world, howsoever bad be social adjust- 
ments. 

But whatever is potent for evil may be made potent 
for good. The change I have proposed would destroy 
the conditions that distort impulses in themselves benefi- 
cent, and would transmute the forces which now tend 
to disintegrate society into forces which would tend to 
unite and purify it. 

Give labor a free field and its full earnings; take for 
the benefit of the whole community that fund which the 
growth of the community creates, and want and the fear 
of want would be gone. The springs of production 
would be set free, and the enormous increase of wealth 
would give the poorest ample comfort. Men would no 
more worry about finding employment than they worry 
about finding air to breathe; they need have no more 
care about physical necessities than do the lilies o £ the field. 
The progress of science, the march of invention, the 
diffusion of knowledge, would bring their benefits to all. 

With this abolition of want and the fear of want, the 
admiration of riches would decay, and men would seek 
the respect and approbation of their fellows in other 
modes than by the acquisition and display of wealth. In 
this way there would be brought to the management of 
public affairs, and the administration of common funds, 



460 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX. 

the skill, the attention, the fidelity, and integrity that 
can now be secured only for private interests, and a rail- 
road or gas works might be operated on public account, 
not only more economically and efficiently than as at 
present, under joint stock management, but as econom- 
ically and efficiently as would be possible under a single 
ownership. The prize of the Olympian games, that 
called forth the most strenuous exertions of all Greece, 
was but a wreath of wild olive; for a bit of ribbon men 
have over and over again performed services no money 
could have bought. 

Shortsighted is the philosophy which counts on selfish- 
ness as the master motive of human action. It is blind 
to facts of which the world is full. It sees not the 
present, and reads not the past aright. If you would 
move men to action, to what shall you appeal? Not to 
their pockets, but to their patriotism; not to selfishness, 
but to sympathy. Self-interest is, as it were, a mechan- 
ical force — potent, it is true; capable of large and wide 
results. But there is in human nature what may be 
likened to a chemical force; which melts and fuses and 
overwhelms; to which nothing seems impossible. "All 
that a man hath will he give for his life" — that is self- 
interest. But in loyalty to higher impulses men will give 
even life. 

It is not selfishness that enriches the annals of every 
people with heroes and saints. It is not selfishness that 
on every page of the world's history bursts out in sudden 
splendor of noble deeds or sheds the soft radiance of 
benignant lives. It was not selfishness that turned 
Gautama's back to his royal home or bade the Maid of 
Orleans lift the sword from the altar; that held the 
Three Hundred in the Pass of Thermopylae, or gathered 
into Winkelried's bosom the sheaf of spears; that 
chained Vincent de Paul to the bench of the galley, or 
"brought little starving children, during the Indian 



Chap. IV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 461 

famine, tottering to the relief stations with yet weaker 
starvelings in their arms. Call it religion, patriotism, 
sympathy, the enthusiasm for humanity, or the love of 
God — give it what name you will; there is yet a force 
which overcomes and drives out selfishness; a force 
which is the electricity of the moral universe; a force 
beside which all others are weak. Everywhere that men 
have lived it has shown its power, and to-day, as ever, 
the world is full of it. To be pitied is the man who has 
never seen and never felt it. Look around! among com- 
mon men and women, amid the care and the struggle of 
daily life, in the jar of the noisy street and amid the 
squalor where want hides — every here and there is the 
darkness lighted with the tremulous play of its lambent 
flames. He who has not seen it has walked with shut 
eyes. He who looks may see, as says Plutarch, that "the 
soul has a principle of kindness in itself, and is born to 
love, as well as to perceive, think, or remember." 

And this force of forces — that now goes to waste or 
assumes perverted forms — we may use for the strengthen- 
ing, and building up, and ennobling of society, if we 
but will, just as we now use physical forces that once 
seemed but powers of destruction. All we have to do is 
but to give it freedom and scope. The wrong that pro- 
duces inequality; the wrong that in the midst of abun- 
dance tortures men with want or harries them with the 
fear of want; that stunts them physically, degrades them 
intellectually, and distorts them morally, is what alone 
prevents harmonious social development. For "all that 
is from the gods is full of providence. We are made for 
co-operation — like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the 
rows of the upper and lower teeth." 

There are people into whose heads it never enters to 
conceive of any better state of society than that which 
now exists — who imagine that the idea that there could 
be a state of society in which greed would be banished, 



462 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book 7X 

prisons stand empty, individual interests be subordinated 
to general interests, and no one seek to rob or to oppress 
his neighbor, is but the dream of impracticable dreamers, 
for whom these practical level-headed men, who pride 
themselves on recognizing facts as they are, have a 
hearty contempt. But such men — though some of them 
write books, and some of them occupy the chairs of uni- 
versities, and some of them stand in pulpits — do not think. 

If they were accustomed to dine in such eating houses 
as are to be found in the lower quarters of London and 
Paris, where the knives and forks are chained to the 
table, they would deem it the natural, ineradicable dis- 
position of man to carry off the knife and fork with 
which he has eaten. 

Take a company of well-bred men and women dining 
together. There is no struggling for food, no attempt 
on the part of any one to get more than his neighbor; no 
attempt to gorge or to carry off. On the contrary, each 
one is anxious to help his neighbor before he partakes 
himself; to offer to others the best rather than pick it 
out for himself; and should any one show the slightest 
disposition to prefer the gratification of his own appetite 
to that of the others, or in any way to act the pig or 
pilferer, the swift and heavy penalty of social contempt 
and ostracism would show how such conduct is repro- 
bated by common opinion. 

All this is so common as to excite no remark, as to 
seem the natural state of things. Yet it is no more 
natural that men should not be greedy of food than that 
they should not be greedy of wealth. They are greedy 
of food when they are not assured that there will be a 
fair and equitable distribution which will give each 
enough. But when these conditions are assured, they 
cease to be greedy of food. And so in society, as at 
present constituted, men are greedy of wealth because 
the conditions of distribution are so unjust that instead 



Chap. IV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 463 

of each being sure of enough, many are certain to be 
condemned to want. It is the "devil catch the hind- 
most" of present social adjustments that causes the race 
and scramble for wealth, in which all considerations of 
justice, mercy, religion, and sentiment are trampled 
under foot; in which men forget their own souls, and 
struggle to the very verge of the grave for what they 
cannot take beyond. But an equitable distribution of 
wealth, that would exempt all from the fear of want, 
would destroy the greed of wealth, just as in polite 
society the greed of food has been destroyed. 

On the crowded steamers of the early California lines 
there was often a marked difference between the manners 
of the steerage and the cabin, which illustrates this prin- 
ciple of human nature. An abundance of food was pro- 
vided for the steerage as for the cabin, but in the former 
there were no regulations which insured efficient service, 
and the meals became a scramble. In the cabin, on the 
contrary, where each was allotted his place and there 
was no fear that every one would not get enough, there 
was no such scrambling and waste as were witnessed in 
the steerage. The difference was not in the character of 
the people, but simply in this fact. The cabin passenger 
transferred to the steerage would participate in the 
greedy rush, and the steerage passenger transferred to 
the cabin would at once become decorous and polite. 
The same difference would show itself in society in 
general were the present unjust distribution of wealth 
replaced by a just distribution. 

Consider this existing fact of a cultivated and refined 
society, in which all the coarser passions are held in 
check, not by force, not by law, but by common opinion 
and the mutual desire of pleasing. If this is possible 
for a part of a community, it is possible for a whole com- 
munity. There are states of society in which every one 
has to go armed — in which every one has to hold him- 



464 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDYo Booh IX. 

self in readiness to defend person and property with the 
strong hand. If we have progressed beyond that, we may 
progress still further. 

But it may be said, to banish want and the fear of 
want, would be to destroy the stimulus to exertion; men 
would become simply idlers, and such a happy state of 
general comfort and content would be the death of prog- 
ress. This is the old slaveholders' argument, that men 
can be driven to labor only with the lash. Nothing ia 
more untrue. 

Want might be banished, but desire would remain. 
Man is the unsatisfied animal. He has but begun to ex- 
plore, and the universe lies before him. Each step that 
he takes opens new vistas and kindles new desires. Ha 
is the constructive animal; he builds, he improves, he 
invents, and puts together, and the greater the thing he 
does, the greater the thing he wants to do. He is more 
than an animal. Whatever be the intelligence that 
breathes through nature, it is in that likeness that man 
is made. The steamship, driven by her throbbing 
engines through the sea, is in kind, though not in 
degree, as much a creation as the whale that swims be- 
neath. The telescope and the microscope, what are they 
but added eyes, which man has made for himself; the 
soft webs and fair colors in which our women array them- 
selves, do they not answer to the plumage that nature 
gives the bird? Man must be doing something, or fancy 
that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative 
impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, 
but an abnormal man. 

As soon as a child can command its muscles, it will 
begin to make mud pies or dress a doll; its play is but the 
imitation of the work of its elders; its very destructive- 
ness arises from the desire to be doing something, from 
the satisfaction of seeing itself accomplish something. 
There is no such thing as the pursuit of pleasure for the 



Chap. TV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 465 

sake of pleasure. Our very amusements amuse only as 
they are, or simulate, the learning or the doing of some- 
thing. The moment they cease to appeal either to our 
inquisitive or to our constructive powers, they cease tc 
amuse. It will spoil the interest of the novel reader to 
be told just how the story will end; it is only the chance 
and the skill involved in the game that enable the card- 
player to "kill time" by shuffling bits of pasteboard. 
The luxurious frivolities of Versailles were possible to 
human beings only because the king thought he was 
governing a kingdom and the courtiers were in pursuit 
of fresh honors and new pensions. People who lead 
what are called lives of fashion and pleasure must have 
some other object in view, or they would die of ennui; 
they support it only because they imagine that they are 
gaining position, making friends, or improving the 
chances of their children. Shut a man up, and deny 
him employment, and he must either die or go mad. 

It is not labor in itself that is repugnant to man; it is 
not the natural necessity for exertion which is a curse. 
It is only labor which produces nothing — exertion of 
which he cannot see the results. To toil day after day, 
and yet get but the necessaries of life, this is indeed 
hard; it is like the infernal punishment of compelling 
a man to pump lest he be drowned, or to trudge on a 
treadmill lest he be crushed. But, released from this 
necessity, men would but work the harder and the bet- 
ter, for then they would work as their inclinations led 
them; then would they seem to be really doing some- 
thing for themselves or for others. Was Humboldt's 
life an idle one? Did Franklin find no occupation when 
he retired from the printing business with enough to live 
on ? Is Herbert Spencer a laggard ? Did Michael Angelo 
paint for board and clothes? 

The fact is that the work which improves the condi- 
tion of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and 



466 EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY. Book IX. 

increases power, and enriches literature, and elevates 
thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the 
work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of 
a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men 
who perform it for its own sake, and not that they may 
get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state 
of society where want was abolished, work of this sort 
would be enormously increased. 

I am inclined to think that the result of confiscating 
rent in the manner I have proposed would be to cause 
the organization of labor, wherever large capitals were 
used, to assume the co-operative form, since the more 
equal diffusion of wealth would unite capitalist and 
laborer in the same person. But whether this would be 
so or not is of little moment. The hard toil of routine 
labor would disappear. Wages would be too high and 
opportunities too great to compel any man to stint and 
starve the higher qualities of his nature, and in every 
avocation the brain would aid the hand. Work, even of 
the coarser kinds, would become a lightsome thing, and 
the tendency of modern production to subdivision would 
not involve monotony or the contraction of ability in the 
worker; but would be relieved by short hours, by change, 
by the alternation of intellectual with manual occupa- 
tions. There would result, not only the utilization of 
productive forces now going to waste; not only would 
our present knowledge, now so imperfectly applied, be 
fully used; but from the mobility of labor and the men- 
tal activity which would be generated, there would result 
advances in the methods of production that we now 
cannot imagine. 

For, greatest of all the enormous wastes which the 
present constitution of society involves, is that of mental 
power. How infinitesimal are the forces that concur to 
the advance of civilization, as compared to the forces 
that lie latent! How few are the thinkers, the discover- 



Chap. IV. UPOX SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 407 

ers, the inventors, the organizers, as compared with the 
great majs of the people! Yet such men are born in 
plenty; it is the conditions that permit so few to 
develop. There are among men infinite diversities of 
aptitude and inclination, as there are such infinite diver- 
sities in physical structure that among a million there 
will not be two that cannot be told apart. But, both 
from observation and reflection, I am inclined to think 
that the differences of natural power are no greater than 
the differences of stature or of physical strength. Turn 
to the lives of great men, and see how easily they might 
never have been heard of c Had Caesar come of a prole- 
tarian family; had Napoleon entered the world a few 
years earlier; had Columbus gone into the Church in- 
stead of going to sea; had Shakespeare been apprenticed 
to a cobbler or chimney-sweep; had Sir Isaac Newton 
been assigned by fate the education and the toil of an 
agricultural laborer; had Dr. Adam Smith been born in 
the coal hews, or Herbert Spencer forced to get his living 
as a factory operative, what would their talents have 
availed? But there would have been, it will be said, 
other Caesars or Napoleons, Columbuses or Shakespeares, 
Newtons, Smiths or Spencers. This is true. And it 
shows how prolific is our human nature. As the com- 
mon worker is on need transformed into queen bee, so, 
when circumstances favor his development, what might 
otherwise pass for a common man rises into a hero or 
leader, discoverer or teacher, sage or saint. So widely 
has the sower scattered the seed, so strong is the germina- 
tive force that bids it bud and blossom. But, alas, for 
the stony ground, and the birds and the tares! For one 
who attains his full stature, how many are stunted and 
deformed. 

The will within us is the ultimate fact of conscious- 
ness. Yet how little have the best of us, in acquire- 
ments, in position, even in character, that may be cred- 



468- EFFECTS OF THE EEMEDY. Book IX 

ited entirely to ourselves; how much to the influences 
that have molded us. Who is there, wise, learned, dis- 
creet, or strong, who might not, were he to trace the 
inner history of his life, turn, like the Stoic Emperor, to 
give thanks to the gods, that by this one and that one, 
and here and there, good examples have been set him, 
noble thoughts have reached him, and happy opportuni- 
ties opened before him. Who is there, who, with his 
eyes about him, has reached the meridian of life, who has 
not sometimes echoed the thought of the pious English- 
man, as the criminal passed to the gallows, "But for the 
grace of God, there go I." How little does heredity 
count as compared with conditions. This one, we say, is 
the result of a thousand years of European progress, and 
that one of a thousand years of Chinese petrifaction; 
yet, placed an infant in the heart of China, and but for 
the angle of the eye or the shade of the hair, the Cau- 
casian would grow up as those around him, using the 
same speech, thinking the same thoughts, exhibiting the 
same tastes. Change Lady Vere de Vere in her cradle 
with an infant of the slums, and will the blood of a hun- 
dred earls give you a refined and cultured woman? 

To remove want and the fear of want, to give to all 
classes leisure, and comfort, and independence, the decen- 
cies and refinements of life, the opportunities of mental and 
moral development, would be like turning water into a 
desert. The sterile waste would clothe itself with 
verdure, and the barren places where life seemed banned 
would ere long be dappled with the shade of trees and 
musical with the song of birds. Talents now hidden, 
virtues unsuspected, would come forth to make human 
life richer, fuller, happier, nobler. For in these round 
men who are stuck into three-cornered holes, and three- 
cornered men who are jammed into round holes; in these 
men who are wasting their energies in the scramble to 
be rich* in these who in factories are turned into ma- 



Chap. IV. UPON SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 469 

chines, or are chained by necessity to bench or plow; in 
these children who are growing up in squalor, and vice, 
and ignorance, are powers of the highest order, talents 
the most splendid. They need but the opportunity to 
bring them forth. 

Consider the possibilities of a state of society that gave 
that opportunity to all. Let imagination fill out the 
picture; its colors grow too bright for words to paint. 
Consider the moral elevation, the intellectual activity, 
the social life. Consider how by a thousand actions and 
interactions the members of every community are linked 
together, and how in the present condition of things 
even the fortunate few who stand upon the apex of the 
social pyramid must suffer, though they know it not, 
from the want, ignorance, and degradation that are 
underneatho Consider these things and then say whether 
the change I propose would not be for the benefit of 
every one — even the greatest land holder? Would he not 
be safer of the future of his children in leaving them 
penniless in such a state of society than in leaving them 
the largest fortune in this? Did such a state of society 
anywhere exist, would he not buy entrance to it cheaply 
by giving up all his possessions? 

I have now traced to their source social weakness and 
disease. I have shown the remedy. I have covered 
every point and met every objection. But the problems 
that we have been considering, great as they are, pass 
into problems greater yet — into the grandest problems 
with which the human mind can grapple. I am about 
to ask the reader who has gone with me so far, to go 
with me further, into still higher fields. But I ask him 
to remember that in the little space which remains of 
the limits to which this book must be confined, I cannot 
fully treat the questions which arise. I can but suggest 
some thoughts, which may 5 perhaps,, serve as hints for 
further thought 



BOOK X, 

THE LAW OP HUMAN PKOGKESS. 



CHAPTER I, — THE CURRENT THEORY OF HUMAN" PRO- 
GRESS — ITS INSUFFICIENCY. 

CHAPTER II. — DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION — TO WHAT 

DUE. 

CHAPTER III. — THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 

CHAPTER IY. — HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 

CHAPTER V. — THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 



What in me is dark 
illumine, what is low raise and support; 
That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal Providence 
And justify the ways of God to men. 

— MlltOTL 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CURRENT THEORY OF HUMAN PROGRESS— ITS IN- 
SUFFICIENCY. 

If the conclusions at which we have arrived are cor- 
rect, they will fall under a larger generalization. 

Let us, therefore, recommence our inquiry from a 
higher standpoint, whence we may survey a wider field. 

What is the law of human progress ? 

This is a question which, were it not for what has 
gone before, I should hesitate to review in the brief 
space I can now devote to it, as it involves, directly or 
indirectly, some of the very highest problems with which 
the human mind can engage. But it is a question which 
naturally comes up. Are or are not the conclusions to 
which we have come consistent with the great law under 
which human development goes on? 

What is that law? We must find the answer to our 
question; for the current philosophy, though it clearly 
recognizes the existence of such a law, gives no more sat- 
isfactory account of it than the current political economy 
does of the persistence of want amid advancing wealth. 

Let us, as far as possible, keep to the firm ground of 
facts. Whether man was or was not gradually developed 
from an animal, it is not necessary to inquire. However 
intimate may be the connection between questions which 
relate to man as we know him and questions which relate 
to his genesis, it is only from the former upon the latter 
that light can be thrown. Inference cannot proceed 
from the unknown to the known. It is only from facts 



474 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X 

of which we are cognizant that we can infer what has 
preceded cognizance. 

However man may have originated, all we know of 
him is as man — just as he is now to be found. There is 
no record or trace of him in any lower condition than 
that in which savages are still to be met. By whatever 
bridge he may have crossed the wide chasm which now 
separates him from the brutes, there remain of it no 
vestiges. Between the lowest savages of whom we know 
and the highest animals, there is an irreconcilable differ- 
ence — a difference not merely of degree, but of kind. 
Many of the characteristics, actions, and emotions of 
man are exhibited by the lower animals; but man, no 
matter how low in the scale of humanity, has never yet 
been found destitute of one thing of which no animal 
shows the slightest trace, a clearly recognizable but al- 
most undefinable something, which gives him the power 
of improvement — which makes him the progressive 
animal. 

The beaver builds a dam, and the bird a nest, and the 
bee a cell; but while beavers' dams, and birds' nests, 
and bees' cells are always constructed on the same model, 
the house of the man passes from the rude hut of leaves 
and branches to the magnificent mansion replete with 
modern conveniences. The dog can to a certain extent 
connect cause and effect, and may be taught some tricks; 
but his capacity in these respects has not been a whit 
increased during all the ages he has been the associate of 
improving man, and the dog of civilization is not a whit 
more accomplished or intelligent than the dog of the 
wandering savage. We know of no animal that uses 
clothes, that cooks its food, that makes itself tools or 
weapons, that breeds other animals that it wishes to eat, 
or that has an articulate language. But men who do 
not do such things have never yet been found, or heard 
of, except in fable. That is to say, man, wherever we 



Chap. J. INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 475 

know him, exhibits this power — of supplementing what 
nature has done for him by what he does for himself; 
and, in fact, so inferior is the physical endowment of 
man, that there is no part of the world, save perhaps 
some of the small islands of the Pacific, where without 
this faculty he could maintain an existence. 

Man everywhere and at all times exhibits this faculty 
— everywhere and at all times of which we have knowl- 
edge he has made some use of it. But the degree 
in which this has been done greatly varies. Between 
the rude canoe and the steamship; between the boom- 
erang and the repeating rifle; between the roughly carved 
wooden idol and the breathing marble of Grecian art; 
between savage knowledge and modern science; be- 
tween the wild Indian and the white settler; between 
the Hottentot woman and the belle of polished society, 
there is an enormous difference. 

The varying degrees in which this faculty is used can- 
not be ascribed to differences in original capacity — the 
most highly improved peoples of the present day were 
savages within historic times, and we meet with the 
widest differences between peoples of the same stock. 
Nor can they be wholly ascribed to differences in phys- 
ical environment — the cradles of learning and the arts are 
now in many cases tenanted by barbarians, and within a 
few years great cities rise on the hunting grounds of wild 
tribes. All these differences are evidently connected with 
social development. Beyond perhaps the veriest rudi- 
ments, it becomes possible for man to improve only as 
he lives with his fellows. All these improvements, 
therefore, in man's powers and condition we summarize 
in the term civilization. Men improve as they become 
civilized, or learn to co-operate in society. 

What is the law of this improvement? By what com- 
mon principle can we explain the different stages of civili- 
zation at which different communities have arrived? In 



476 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X. 

what consists essentially the progress of civilization, so 
that we may say of varying social adjustments, this favors 
it, and that does not; or explain why an institution or 
condition which may at one time advance it may at an- 
other time retard it? 

The prevailing belief now is, that the progress of civi- 
lization is a development or evolution, in the course of 
which men's powers are increased and his qualities im- 
proved by the operation of causes similar to those which 
are relied upon as explaining the genesis of species — viz., 
the survival of the fittest and the hereditary transmission 
of acquired qualities. 

That civilization is an evolution — that it is, in the 
language of Herbert Spencer, a progress from an in- 
definite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent 
heterogeneity — there is no doubt; but to say this is not 
to explain or identify the causes which forward or retard 
it. How far the sweeping generalizations of Spencer, 
which seek to account for all phenomena under terms of 
matter and force, may, properly understood, include all 
these causes, I am unable to say; but, as scientifically 
expounded, the development philosophy has either not 
yet definitely met this question, or has given birth, or 
rather coherency, to an opinion which does not accord 
with the facts. 

The vulgar explanation of progress is, I think, very 
much like the view naturally taken by the money maker 
of the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth. His 
theory, if he has one, usually is, that there is plenty of 
money to be made by those who have will and ability, 
and that it is ignorance, or idleness, or extravagance, 
that makes the difference between the rich and the poor. 
And so the common explanation of differences of civiliza- 
tion is of differences in capacity. The civilized races are 
the superior races, and advance in civilization is accord- 
ing to this superiority — just as English victories were, in 



4hap. L INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 47? 

common English opinion, due to the natural superiority 
of Englishmen to frog-eating Frenchmen; and popular 
government, active invention, and greater average com- 
fort are, or were until lately, in common American opin- 
ion, due to the greater "smartness of the Yankee 
Nation." 

Now, just as the politico-economic doctrines which in 
the beginning of this inquiry we met and disproved, 
harmonize with the common opinion of men who see 
capitalists paying wages and competition reducing wages; 
just as the Malthusian theory harmonized with existing 
prejudices both of the rich and the poor; so does the ex- 
planation of progress as a gradual race improvement 
harmonize with the vulgar opinion which accounts by 
race differences for differences in civilization. It has 
given coherence and a scientific formula to opinions 
which already prevailed. Its wonderful spread since the 
time Darwin first startled the world with his "Origin of 
Species" has not been so much a conquest as an assimila- 
tion. 

The view which now dominates the world of thought 
is this: That the struggle for existence, just in propor- 
tion as it becomes intense, impels men to new efforts and 
inventions. That this improvement and capacity ior 
improvement is fixed by hereditary transmission, and 
extended by the tendency of the best adapted individual, 
or most improved individual, to survive and propagate 
among individuals, and of the best adapted, or most im- 
proved tribe, nation, or race to survive in the struggle 
between social aggregates. On this theory the differ- 
ences between man and the animals, and differences in 
the relative progress of men, are now explained as confi- 
dently, and all but as generally, as a little while ago they 
were explained upon the theory of special creation and 
divine interposition., 

The practical outcome of this theory is in a sort of 



478 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

hopeful fatalism, of which current literature is full.* In 
this view, progress is the result of forces which work 
slowly, steadily and remorselessly, for the elevation of man. 
War, slavery, tyranny, superstition, famine, and pesti- 
lence, the want and misery which fester in modern civili- 
zation, are the impelling causes which drive man on, by 
eliminating poorer types and extending the higher; and 
hereditary transmission is the power by which advances 
are fixed, and past advances made the footing for new 
advances. The individual is the result of changes thus 
impressed upon and perpetuated through a long series of 
past individuals, and the social organization takes its 
form from the individuals of which it is composed. 
Thus, while this theory is, as Herbert Spencer saysf — 
"radical to a degree beyond anything which current 
radicalism conceives;" inasmuch as it looks for changes 
in the very nature of man; it is at the same time "con- 
servative to a degree beyond anything conceived by cur- 
rent conservatism," inasmuch as it holds that no change 
can avail save these slow changes in men's natures. 
Philosophers may teach that this does not lessen the 
duty of endeavoring to reform abuses, just as the theo- 
logians who taught predestinarianism insisted on the 
■ ' * ■ ■ ^ 

* In semi-scientific or popularized form this may perhaps be seen 
in best, because frankest, expression in "The Martyrdom of Man," 
by Win wood Reade, a writer of singular vividness and power. This 
book is in reality a history of progress, or, rather, a monograph upon 
its causes and methods, and will well repay perusal for its vivid pic- 
tures, whatever may be thought of the capacity of the author for 
philosophic generalization. The connection between subject and 
title may be seen by the conclusion: "I give to universal history a 
strange but true title — The Martyrdom of Man. In each generation 
the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by 
their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the 
past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit 
of those who are to come?" 

f "The Study of Sociology "—Conclusion. 



Chap.l. INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 479 

duty of all to struggle for salvation; but, as generally 
apprehended, the result is fatalism — "do what we may, 
the mills of the gods grind on regardless either of our 
aid or our hindrance/ ' I allude to this only to illustrate 
what I take to be the opinion now rapidly spreading and 
permeating common thought; not that in the search for 
truth any regard for its efEects should be permitted to 
bias the mind. But this I take to be the current view of 
civilization: That it is the result of forces, operating in 
the way indicated, which slowly change the character, 
and improve and elevate the powers of man; that the 
difference between civilized man and savage is of a long 
race education, which has become permanently fixed in 
mental organization; and that this improvement tends to 
go on increasingly, to a higher and higher civilization. 
We have reached such a point that progress seems to 
be natural with us, and we look forward confidently to 
the greater achievements of the coming race — some even 
holding that the progress of science will finally give men 
immortality and enable them to make bodily the tour not 
only of the planets, but of the fixed stars, and at length 
to manufacture suns and systems for themselves.* 

But without soaring to the stars, the moment that 
this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us 
amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, 
it comes against an enormous fact-— the fixed, petrified 
civilizations. The majority of the human race to-day 
have no idea of progress; the majority of the human race 
to-day look (as until a few generations ago our own an- 
cestors looked) upon the past as the time of human per- 
fection. The difference between the savage and the 
civilized man may be explained on the theory that the 
former is as yet so imperfectly developed that his prog- 
ress is hardly apparent; but how, upon the theory that 
human progress is the result of general and continuous 

* Winwood Reade, "The Martyrdom of MaD." 



480 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

causes, shall we account for the civilizations that have 
progressed so far and then stopped? It cannot be said 
of the Hindoo and of the Chinaman, as it may be said of 
the savage, that our superiority is the result of a longer 
education; that we are, as it were, the grown men of 
nature, while they are the children. The Hindoos and 
the Chinese were civilized when we were savages. They 
had groat cities, highly organized and powerful govern- 
ments, literatures, philosophies, polished manners, con- 
siderable division of labor, large commerce, and elaborate 
arts, when our ancestors were wandering barbarians, liv- 
ing in huts and skin tents, not a whit further advanced 
than the American Indians. While we have progressed 
from this savage state to Nineteenth Century civiliza- 
tion, they have stood still. If progress be the result of 
fixed laws, inevitable and eternal, which impel men for- 
ward, how shall we account for this? 

One of the best popular expounders of the develop- 
ment philosophy, Walter Bagehot ("Physics and Poli- 
tics"), admits the force of this objection, and endeavors 
in this way to explain it: That the first thing necessary 
to civilize man is to tame him; to induce him to live in 
association with his fellows in subordination to law; and 
hence a body or "cake" of laws and customs grows up, 
being intensified and extended by natural selection, the 
tribe or nation thus bound together having an advantage 
over those who are not. That this cake of custom and 
law finally becomes too thick and hard to permit further 
progress, which can go on only as circumstances occui 
which introduce discussion, and thus permit the freedom 
and mobility necessary to improvement. 

This explanation, which Mr. Bagehot offers, as he says, 
with some misgivings, is I think at the expense of the 
general theory. But it is not worth while speaking of 
that, for it, manifestly, does not explain the facts. 

The hardening tendency of which Mr. Bagehot speaks 



CJiap.L INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 481 

would show itself at a very early period of development, 
and his illustrations of it are nearly all drawn from 
savage or semi-savage life. Whereas, these arrested civi- 
lizations had gone a long distance before they stopped. 
There must have been a time when they were very 
far advanced as compared with the savage state, and 
were yet plastic, free, and advancing. These arrested 
civilizations stopped at a point which was hardly in any- 
thing inferior and in many respects superior to European 
civilization of, say, the sixteenth or at any rate the fif- 
teenth century. Up to that point then there must have 
been discussion, the hailing of what was new, and men- 
tal activity of all sorts. They had architects who carried 
the art of building, necessarily by a series of innovations 
or improvements, up to a very high point; ship-builders 
who in the same way, by innovation after innovation, 
finally produced as good a vessel as the war ships of 
Henry VIII.; inventors who stopped only on the verge of 
our most important improvements, and from some of 
whom we can yet learn; engineers who constructed great 
irrigation works and navigable canals; rival schools of 
philosophy and conflicting ideas of religion. One great 
religion, in many respects resembling Christianity, rose 
in India, displaced the old religion, passed into China, 
sweeping over that country, and was displaced again in 
its old seats, just as Christianity was displaced in its first 
seats. There was life, and active life, and the innova- 
tion that begets improvement, long after men had 
learned to live together. And, moreover, both India 
and China have received the infusion of new life in con- 
quering races, with different customs and modes of 
thought. 

The most fixed and petrified of all civilizations of which 
are know anything was that of Egypt, where even art 
finally assumed a conventional and inflexible form. But 
we know that behind this must have been a time of life 



482 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PKOGRESSo Book X 

anil vigor — a freshly developing and expanding civiliza- 
tion, such as ours is now — or the arts and sciences could 
never have been carried to such a pitch. And recent 
excavations have brought to light from beneath what we 
before knew of Egypt an earlier Egypt still — in statues 
and carvings which, instead of a hard and formal type, 
beam with life and expression, which show art strug- 
gling, ardent, natural, and free, the sure indication of 
an active and expanding life. So it must have been once 
with all now unprogressive civilizations. 

But it is not merely these arrested civilizations that 
the current theory of development fails to account for. 
It is not merely that men have gone so far on the path 
of progress and then stopped; it is that men have gone 
far on the path of progress and then gone back. It is 
not merely an isolated case that thus confronts the theory 
— it is the universal rule. Every civilization that the 
world has yet seen has had its period of vigorous growth, 
of arrest and stagnation; its decline and fall. Of all the 
civilizations that have arisen and flourished, there re- 
main to-day but those that have been arrested, and our 
own, which is not yet as old as were the pyramids when 
Abraham looked upon them — while behind the pyramids 
were twenty centuries of recorded history. 

That our own civilization has a broader base, is of a 
more advanced type, moves quicker and soars higher 
than any preceding civilization is undoubtedly true; but 
in these respects it is hardly more in advance of the 
Greco-Roman civilization than that was in advance of 
Asiatic civilization; and if it were, that would prove 
nothing as to its permanence and future advance, unless 
it be shown that it is superior in those things which 
caused the ultimate failure of its predecessors. The 
current theory does not assume this. 

In truth, nothing could be further from explaining the 
facts of universal history than this theory that civiliza- 



Chap. L INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 483 

tion is the result of a course of natural selection which 
operates to improve and elevate the powers of man. 
That civilization has arisen at different times in different 
places and has progressed at different rates, is not incon- 
sistent with this theory; for that might result from the 
unequal balancing of impelling and resisting forces; but 
that progress everywhere commencing, for even among 
the lowest tribes it is held that there has been some 
progress, has nowhere been continuous, but has every- 
where been brought to a stand or retrogression, is abso- 
lutely inconsistent. For if progress operated to fix an 
improvement in man's nature and thus to produce further 
progress, though there might be occasional interruption, 
yet the general rule would be that progress would be 
continuous — that advance would lead to advance, and 
civilization develop into higher civilization. 

Not merely the general rule, but the universal rule, is 
the reverse of this. The earth is the tomb of the dead 
empires, no less than of dead men. Instead of progress 
fitting men for greater progress, every civilization that 
was in its own time as vigorous and advancing as ours is 
now, has of itself come to a stop. Over and over again, 
art has declined, learning sunk, power waned, popula- 
tion become sparse, until the people who had built great 
temples and mighty cities, turned rivers and pierced 
mountains, cultivated the earth like a garden and intro- 
duced the utmost refinement into the minute affairs of 
life, remained but in a remnant of squalid barbarians, 
who had lost even the memorv of what their ancestors 

if 

had done, and regarded the surviving fragments of their 
grandeur as the work of genii, or of the mighty race be- 
fore the flood. So true is this, that when we think of 
the past, it seems like the inexorable law, from which we 
can no more hope to be exempt than the young man 
who "feels his life in every limb" can hope to be exempt 
from the dissolution which is the common fate of all. 



484 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGKESSo Book X. 

"Even this, Rome, must one day be thy fate!" wept 
Scipio over the ruins of Carthage, and Macaulay's pic- 
ture of the New Zealander musing upon the broken arch 
of London Bridge appeals to the imagination of even 
those who see cities rising in the wilderness and help to 
lay the foundations of new empire. And so, when we 
erect a public building we make a hollow in the largest 
corner stone and carefully seal within it some mementos 
of our day, looking forward to the time when our works 
shall be ruins and ourselves forgot. 

Nor whether this alternate rise and fall of civilization, 
this retrogression that always follows progression, be, or 
be not, the rhythmic movement of an ascending line 
(and I think, though I will not open the question, that 
it would be much more difficult to prove the affirmative 
than is generally supposed) makes no difference; for the 
current theory is in either case disproved. Civilizations 
have died and made no sign, and hard-won progres: has 
been lost to the race forever, but, even if it be admitted 
that each wave of progress has made possible a higher 
wave and each civilization passed the torch to a greater 
civilization, the theory that civilization advances by 
changes wrought in the nature of man fails to explain 
the facts; for in every case it is not the race that has 
been educated and hereditarily modified by the old civili- 
zation that begins the new, but a fresh race coming from 
a lower level. It is the barbarians of the one epoch who 
have been the civilized men of the next; to be in their 
turn succeeded by fresh barbarians. For it has been 
heretofore always the case that men under the influences 
of civilization, though at first improving, afterward 
degenerate. The civilized man of to-day is vastly the 
superior of the uncivilized; but so in the time of its 
vigor was the civilized man of every dead civilization. 
But there are such things as the vices, the corruptions, 
the enervations of civilization, which past a certain point 



Chap. I. INSUFFICIENCY OF THE CURRENT THEORY. 485 

have always heretofore shown themselves. Every civili- 
zation that has been overwhelmed by barbarians has really 
perished from internal decay. 

This universal fact, the moment that it is recognized, 
disposes of the theory that progress is by hereditary trans- 
mission. Looking over the history of the world, the 
line of greatest advance does not coincide for any length 
of time with any line of heredity. On any particular 
line of heredity, retrogression seems always to follow 
advance. 

Shall we therefore say that there is a national or race 
life, as there is an individual life — that every social 
aggregate has, as it were, a certain amount of energy, 
the expenditure of which necessitates decay? This is an 
old and widespread idea, that is yet largely held, and 
that may be constantly seen cropping out incongruously 
in the writings of the expounders of the development 
philosophy. Indeed, I do not see why it may not be 
stated in terms of matter and of motion so as to bring it 
clearly within the generalizations of evolution. For con- 
sidering its individuals as atoms, the growth of society is 
"an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of 
motion; during which the matter passes from an in- 
definite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent 
heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion 
undergoes a parallel transformation."* And thus an 
analogy may be drawn between the life of a society and 
the life of a solar system upon the nebular hypothesis. 
As the heat and light of the sun are produced by the 
aggregation of atoms evolving motion, which finally 
ceases when the atoms at length come to a state of 
equilibrium or rest, and a state of immobility succeeds, 
which can be broken in again only by the impact of ex- 

* Herbert Spencer's definition of Evolution, " First Principles," p. 
396. 



486 , THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

ternal forces, which reverse the process of evolution, 
integrating motion and dissipating matter in the form of 
gas, again to evolve motion by its condensation; so, it 
may be said, does the aggregation of individuals in a 
community evolve a force which produces the light and 
warmth of civilization, but when this process ceases and 
the individual components are brought into a state of 
equilibrium, assuming their fixed places, petrifaction 
ensues, and the breaking up and diffusion caused by an 
incursion of barbarians is necessary to the recommence- 
ment of the process and a new growth of civilization. 

But analogies are the most dangerous modes of 
thought. They may connect resemblances and yet dis- 
guise or cover up the truth. And all such analogies are 
superficial. While its members are constantly repro- 
duced in all the fresh vigor of childhood, a community 
cannot grow old, as does a man, by the decay of its 
powers. While its aggregate force must be the sum of 
the forces of its individual components, a community 
cannot lose vital power unless the vital powers of its 
components are lessened. 

Yet in both the common analogy which likens the life 
power of a nation to that of an individual, and in the 
one I have supposed, lurks the recognition of an obvious 
truth — the truth that the obstacles which finally bring 
progress to a halt are raised by the course of progress; 
that what has destroyed all previous civilizations has 
been the conditions produced by the growth of civiliza- 
tion itself. 

This is a truth which in the current philosophy is 
ignored; but it* is a truth most pregnant. Any valid 
theory of human progress must account for it. 



CHAPTER II. 

DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION — TO WHAT DUE. 

In attempting to discover the law of human progress, 
the first step must be to determine the essential nature 
of those differences which we describe as differences in 
civilization. 

That the current philosophy, which attributes social 
progress to changes wrought in the nature of man, does 
not accord with historical facts, we have already seen. 
And we may also see, if we consider them, that the 
differences between communities in different stages of 
civilization cannot be ascribed to innate differences in 
the individuals who compose these communities. That 
there are natural differences is true, and that there is 
such a thing as hereditary transmission of peculiarities is 
undoubtedly true; but the great differences between 
men in different states of society cannot be explained in 
this way. The influence of heredity, which it is now 
the fashion to rate so highly, \ is as nothing compared 
with the influences which mold the man after he comes 
into the world. What is more ingrained in habit than 
language, which becomes not merely an automatic trick 
of the muscles, but the medium of thought? What per- 
sists longer, or will quicker show nationality? Yet we 
are not born with a predisposition to any language. Our 
mother tongue is our mother tongue only because we 
learned it in infancy. Although his ancestors have 
thought and spoken in one language for countless gen- 
erations, a child who hears from the first nothing else, 
will learn with equal facility any other tongue. And so 



488 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X. 

of other national or local or class peculiarities. They 
seem to be matters of education and habit, not of trans- 
mission. Cases of white children captured by Indians 
in infancy and brought up in the wigwam show this. 
They become thorough Indians. And so, I believe, with 
children brought up by Gypsies. 

That this is not so true of the children of Indians or 
other distinctly marked races brought up by whites is, I 
think, due to the fact that they are never treated pre- 
cisely as white children. A gentleman who had taught 
a colored school once told me that he thought the colored 
children, up to the age of ten or twelve, were really 
brighter and learned more readily than white children, 
but that after that age they seemed to get dull and care- 
less. He thought this proof of innate race inferiority, 
and so did I at the time. But I afterward heard a 
highly intelligent negro gentleman (Bishop Hillery) in- 
cidentally make a remark which to my mind seems a 
sufficient explanation. He said: "Our children, when 
they are young, are fully as bright as white children, and 
learn as readily. But as soon as they get old enough to 
appreciate their status — to realize that they are looked 
upon as belonging to an inferior race, and can never 
hope to be anything more than cooks, waiters, or some- 
thing of that sort, they lose their ambition and cease to 
keep up." And to this he might have added, that be- 
ing the children of poor, uncultivated and unambitious 
parents, home influences told against them. For, I be- 
lieve it is a matter of common observation that in the 
primary part of education the children of ignorant 
parents are quite as receptive as the children of intelli- 
gent parents, but by and by the latter, as a general rule, 
pull ahead and make the most intelligent men and 
women. The reason is plain. As to the first simple 
things which they learn only at school, they are on a par, 
but as their studies become more complex, the child who 



Chap. II. DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION. 489 

at home is accustomed to good English, hears intelligent 
conversation, has access to books, can get questions 
answered, etc., has an advantage which tells. 

The same thing may be seen later in life. Take a man 
who has raised himself from the ranks of common labor, 
and just as he is brought into contact with men of cul- 
ture and men of affairs, will he become more intelligent 
and polished. Take two brothers, the sons of poor 
parents, brought up in the same home and in the same 
way. One is put to a rude trade, and never gets beyond 
the necessity of making a living by hard daily labor; the 
other, commencing as an errand boy, gets a start in an- 
other direction, and becomes finally a successful lawyer, 
merchant, or politician. At forty or fifty the contrast 
between them will be striking, and the unreflecting will 
credit it to the greater natural ability which has enabled 
the one to push himself ahead. But just as striking a 
difference in manners and intelligence will be manifested 
between two sisters, one of whom, married to a man who 
has remained poor, has her life fretted with petty cares 
and devoid of opportunities, and the other of whom has 
married a man whose subsequent position brings her into 
cultured society and opens to her opportunities which 
refine taste and expand intelligence. And so deteriora- 
tions may be seen. That "evil communications corrupt 
good manners" is but an expression of the general law 
that human character is profoundly modified by its con- 
ditions and surroundings. 

I remember once seeing, in a Brazilian seaport, a negro 
man dressed in what was an evident attempt at the 
height of fashion, but without shoes and stockings. 
One of the sailors with whom I was in company, and who 
had made some runs in the slave trade, had a theory that 
a negro was not a man, but a sort of monkey, and pointed 
to this as evidence in proof, contending that it was not 
natural for a negro to wear shoes, and ihat in his wild 



490 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

state he would wear no clothes at all. I afterward 
learned that it was not considered "the thing" there 
for slaves to wear shoes, just as in England it is not con- 
sidered the thing for a faultlessly attired butler to wear 
jewelry, though for that matter I have since seen white 
men at liberty to dress as they pleased get themselves 
up as incongruously as the Brazilian slave. But a great 
many of the facts adduced as showing hereditary trans 
mission have really no more bearing than this of our 
forecastle Darwinian. 

That, for instance, a large number of criminals and 
recipients of public relief in New York have been shown 
to have descended from a pauper three or four genera- 
tions back is extensively cited as showing hereditary 
transmission. But it shows nothing of the kind, inas- 
much as an adequate explanation of the facts is nearer. 
Paupers will raise paupers, even if the children be not 
their own, just as familiar contact with criminals will 
make criminals of the children of virtuous parents. To 
learn to rely on charity is necessarily to lose the self- 
respect and independence necessary for self-reliance 
when the struggle is hard. So true is this that, as is 
well known, charity has the effect of increasing the de- 
mand for charity, and it is an open question whether 
public relief and private alms do not in this way do far 
more harm than good. And so of the disposition of 
children to show the same feelings, tastes, prejudices, or 
talents as their parents. They imbibe these dispositions 
just as they imbibe from their habitual associates. And 
the exceptions prove the rule, as dislikes or revulsions 
may be excited. 

And there is, I think, a subtler influence which often 
accounts for what are looked upon as atavisms of char- 
acter — the same influence that makes the boy who reads 
dime novels want to be a pirate. I once knew a gentle- 
man in whose veins ran the blood of Indian chiefs. He 



Chap. II. DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION. 491 

used to tell me traditions learned from his grandfather, 
which illustrated what is difficult for a white man to 
comprehend — the Indian habit of thought, the intense 
but patient blood thirst of the trail, and the fortitude of 
the stake. From the way in which he dwelt on these, 
I have no doubt that under certain circumstances, highly 
educated, civilized man that he was, he would have 
shown traits which would have been looked on as due to 
his Indian blood; but which in reality would have been 
sufficiently explained by the broodings of his imagination 
upon the deeds of his ancestors.* 

In any large community we may see, as between differ- 
ent classes and groups, differences of the same kind as 
those which exist between communities which we speak 
of as differing in civilization — differences of knowledge, 
belief, customs, tastes, and speech, which in their ex- 
tremes show among people of the same race, living in 
the same country, differences almost as great as those 
between civilized and savage communities. As all stages 
of social development, from the stone age up, are yet to 
be found in contemporaneously existing communities, so 
in the same country and in the same city are to be 
found, side by side, groups which show similar diversi- 
ties. In such countries as England and Germany, 
children of the same race, born and reared in the same 
place, will grow up, speaking the language differently, 
holding different beliefs, following different customs, 
and showing different tastes; and even in such a country 
as the United States differences of the same kind, though 



* Wordsworth, in his " Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, "has 
aa highly poetical form alluded to this influence: 

Armor rusting in his halls 

On the blood of Clifford calls: 
" Quell the Scot," exclaims the lance; 
"Bear me to the heart of France," 

Is the longing of the shield. 



492 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS, Book X. 

not of the same degree, may be seen between different 
circles or groups. 

But these differences are certainly not innate. No 
baby is born a Methodist or Catholic, to drop its h ? s or 
to sound them. All these differences which distinguish 
different groups or circles are derived from association in 
these circles. 

The Janissaries were made up of youths torn from 
Christian parents at an early age, but they were none 
the less fanatical Moslems and none the less exhibited 
all the Turkish traits; the Jesuits and other orders show 
distinct character, but it is certainly not perpetuated by 
hereditary transmissions; and even such associations as 
schools or regiments, where the components remain but a 
short time and are constantly changing, exhibit general 
characteristics, which are the result of mental impres- 
sions perpetuated by association. 

Now, it is this body of traditions, beliefs, customs, 
laws, habits, and associations, which arise in every com- 
munity and which surround every individual — this 
"super-organic environment," as Herbert Spencer calls 
it, that, as I take it, is the great element in determining 
national character. It is this, rather than hereditary 
transmission, which makes the Englishman differ from 
the Frenchman, the German from the Italian, the 
American from the Chinaman, and the civilized man 
from the savage man. It is in this way that national 
traits are preserved, extended, or altered. 

Within certain limits, or, if you choose, without limits 
in itself, hereditary transmission may develop or alter qual- 
ities, but this is much more true of the physical than of the 
mental part of a man, and much more true of animals than 
it is even of the physical part of man. Deductions from 
the breeding of pigeons or cattle will not apply to man, 
and the reason is clear. The life of man, even in his 
rudest state, is infinitely more complex. He is constantly 



Chap. II. DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION. 493 

acted on by an infinitely greater number of influences, 
amid which the relative influence of heredity becomes 
less and less. A race of men with no greater mental 
activity than the animals — men who only ate, drank, 
slept, and propagated — might, I doubt not, by careful 
treatment and selection in breeding, be made, in course 
of time, to exhibit as great diversities in bodily shape 
and character as similar means have produced in the 
domestic animals. But there are no such men; and in 
men as they are, mental influences, acting through the 
mind upon the body, would constantly interrupt the 
process. You cannot fatten a man whose mind is on the 
strain by cooping him up and feeding him as you would 
fatten a pig. In all probability men have been upon the 
earth longer than many species of animals. They have 
been separated from each other under differences of 
climate that produce the most marked differences in 
animals, and yet the physical differences between the 
different races of men are hardly greater than the differ- 
ence between white horses and black horses — they are 
certainly nothing like as great as between dogs of the 
same sub-species, as, for instance, the different varieties 
of the terrier or spaniel. And even these physical differ- 
ences between races of men, it is held by those who 
account for them by natural selection and hereditary 
transmission, were brought out when man was much 
nearer the animal — that is to say, when he had less mind. 

And if this be true of the physical constitution of 
man, in how much higher degree is it true of his mental 
constitution? All our physical parts we bring with us 
into the world; but the mind develops afterward. 

There is a stage in the growth of every organism in 
which it cannot be told, except by the environment, 
whether the animal that is to be will be fish or reptile, 
monkey or man. And so with the new-born infant; 
whether the mind that is yet to awake to consciousness 



494 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

and power is to be English or German, American or 
Chinese — the mind of a civilized man or the mind of a 
savage — depends entirely on the social environment in 
which it is placed. 

Take a number of infants born of the most highly 
civilized parents and transport them to an uninhabited 
country. Suppose them in some miraculous way to be 
sustained until they come of age to take care of them- 
selves, and what would you have? More helpelss savages 
than any we know of. They would have fire to discover; 
the rudest tools and weapons to invent; language to con- 
struct. They would, in short, have to stumble their way 
to the simplest knowledge which the lowest races now 
possess, just as a child learns to walk. That they would 
in time do all these things I have not the slightest 
doubt, for all these possibilities are latent in the human 
mind just as the power of walking is latent in the human 
frame, but I do not believe they would do them any bet- 
ter or worse, any slower or quicker, than the children of 
barbarian parents placed in the same conditions. Given 
the very highest mental powers that exceptional in- 
dividuals have ever displayed, and what could mankind 
be if one generation were separated from the next by an 
interval of time, as are the seventeen-year locusts? One 
such interval would reduce mankind, not to savagery, 
but to a condition compared with which savagery, as we 
know it, would seem civilization. 

And, reversely, suppose a number of savage infants 
could, unknown to the mothers, for even this would be 
necessary to make the experiment a fair one, be substi- 
tuted for as many children of civilization, can we sup- 
pose that growing up they would show any difference? 
I think no one wl\o has mixed much with different peo- 
ples and classes will think so. The great lesson that is 
thus learned is that "human nature is human nature all 
the world over." And this lesson, too, may be learned 



Ohap. II. DIFFERENCES 1ST CIVILIZATION. 495 

in the library. I speak not so much of the accounts of 
travelers, for the accounts given of savages by the civi- 
lized men who write books are very often just such ac- 
counts as savages would give of us did they make flying 
visits and then write books; but of those mementos of 
the life and thoughts of other times and other peoples, 
which, translated into our language of to-day, are like 
glimpses of our own lives and gleams of our own thought. 
The feeling they inspire is that of the essential similarity 
of men. "This," says Emanuel Deutsch — "this is the 
end of all investigation into history or art. They were 
even as we are." 

There is a people to be found in all parts of the 
world who well illustrate what peculiarities are due 
to hereditary transmission and what to transmission by 
association. The Jews have maintained the purity of 
their blood more scrupulously and for a far longer time 
than any of the European races, yet I am inclined to 
think that the only characteristic that can be attributed 
to this is that of physiognomy, and this is in reality far 
less marked than is conventionally supposed, as any one 
who will take the trouble may see on observation. Al- 
though they have constantly married among themselves, 
the Jews have everywhere been modified by their sur- 
roundings — the English, Eussian, Polish, German, and 
Oriental Jews differing from each other in many respects 
as much as do the other people of those countries. Yet 
they have much in common, and have everywhere pre- 
served their individuality. The reason is clear. It is 
the Hebrew religion — and certainly religion is not trans- 
mitted by generation, but by association — which has 
everywhere preserved the distinctiveness of the Hebrew 
race. This religion, which children derive, not as they 
derive their physical characteristics, but by precept and 
association, is not merely exclusive in its teachings, but 
has, by engendering suspicion and dislike, produced a 



496 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

powerful outside pressure which, even more than its pre- 
cepts, has everywhere constituted of the Jews a com- 
munity within a community. Thus has been built up and 
maintained a certain peculiar environment which gives 
a distinctive character. Jewish intermarriage has been 
the effect, not the cause of this. What persecution 
which stopped short of taking Jewish children from their 
parents and bringing them up outside of this peculiar 
environment could not accomplish, will be accomplished 
by the lessening intensity of religious belief, as is already 
evident in the United States, where the distinction be- 
tween Jew and Gentile is fast disappearing. 

And it seems to me that the influence of this social 
net or environment will explain what is so often taken as 
proof of race differences — the difficulty which less civi- 
lized races show in receiving higher civilization, and the 
manner in which some of them melt away before it. 
Just as one social environment persists, so does it render 
it difficult or impossible for those subject to it to accept 
another. 

The Chinese character is fixed if that of any people is. 
Yet the Chinese in California acquire American modes 
of working, trading, the use of machinery, etc., with 
such facility as to prove that they have no lack of flexi- 
bility, or natural capacity. That they do not change in 
other respects is due to the Chinese environment that 
still persists and still surrounds them. Coming from 
China, they look forward to return to China, and live 
while here in a little China of their own, just as the 
Englishmen in India maintain a little England. It is 
not merely that we naturally seek association with those 
who share our peculiarities, and that thus language, 
religion and custom tend to persist where individuals 
are not absolutely isolated; but that these differences 
provoke an external pressure, which compels such asso- 
ciation. 



Chap. II. DIFFERENCES IK CIVILIZATION. 497 

These obvious principles fully account for all the 
phenomena which are seen in the meeting of one stage or 
body of culture with another, without resort to the 
theory of ingrained differences. For instance, as com- 
parative philology has shown, the Hindoo is of the same 
race as his English conqueror, and individual instances 
have abundantly shown that if he could be placed com- 
pletely and exclusively in the English environment 
(which, as before stated, could be thoroughly done only 
by placing infants in English families in such a way that 
neither they, as they grow up, nor those around them, 
would be conscious of any distinction) one generation 
would be all required to thoroughly implant European 
civilization. But the progress of English ideas and 
habits in India must be necessarily very slow, because 
they meet there the web of ideas and habits constantly 
perpetuated through an immense population, and inter- 
laced with every act of life. 

Mr. Bagehot ("Physics and Politics") endeavors to ex- 
plain the reason why barbarians waste away before our 
civilization, while they did not before that of the an- 
cients, by assuming that the progress of civilization 
has given us tougher physical constitutions. After al- 
luding to the fact that there is no lament in any clas- 
sical writer for the barbarians, but that everywhere the 
barbarian endured the contact with the Eoman and the 
Eoman allied himself to the barbarian, he says (pp. 47-8): 

" Savages in the first year of the Christian era were pretty much 
what they were in the eighteen hundredth; and if they stood the con- 
tact of ancient civilized men and cannot stand ours, it follows that 
our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, 
and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than the ancients carried 
with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a 
meter to gauge the vigor of the constitution to whose contact he is 
exposed." 

Mr. Bagehot does not attempt to explain how it is that 



498 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

eighteen hundred years ago civilization did not give the 
like relative advantage over barbarism that it does now. 
But there is no use of talking about that, or of the lack 
of proof that the human constitution has been a whit 
improved. To any one who has seen how the contact of 
our civilization affects the inferior races, a much readier 
though less flattering explanation will occur. 

It is not because our constitutions are naturally 
tougher than those of the savage, that diseases which are 
comparatively innocuous to us are certain death to him. 
It is that we know and have the means of treating those 
diseases, while he is destitute both of knowledge and 
means. The same diseases with which the scum of civi- 
lization that floats in its advance inoculates the savage 
would prove as destructive to civilized men, if they knew 
no better than to let them run, as he in his ignorance 
has to let them run; and as a matter of fact they were as 
destructive, until we found out how to treat them. And 
not merely this, but the effect of the impingement of 
civilization upon barbarism is to weaken the power of the 
savage without bringing him into the conditions that 
give power to the civilized man. While his habits and 
customs still tend to persist, and do persist as far as they 
can, the conditions to which they were adapted are forci- 
bly changed. He is a hunter in a land stripped of game; 
a warrior deprived of his arms and called on to plead in 
legal technicalities. He is not merely placed between 
cultures, but, as Mr. Bagehot says of the European half- 
breeds in India, he is placed between moralities, and 
learns the vices of civilization without its virtues. He 
loses his accustomed means of subsistence, he loses self- 
respect, he loses morality; he deteriorates and dies away. 
The miserable creatures who may be seen hanging 
around frontier towns or railroad stations, ready to beg, 
or steal, or solicit a viler commerce, are not fair repre- 
sentatives of the Indian before the white man had en- 



Chap. II. DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION". 499 

croached upon his hunting grounds. They have lost the 
strength and virtues of their former state, without gain- 
ing those of a higher. In fact, civilization, as it pushes 
the red man, shows no virtues. To the Anglo-Saxon of 
the frontier, as a rule, the aborigine has no rights which 
the white man is bound to respect. He is impoverished, 
misunderstood, cheated, and abused. He dies out, as, 
under similar conditions, we should die out. He disap- 
pears before civilization as the Eomanized Britons dis- 
appeared before Saxon barbarism. 

The true reason why there is no lament in any classic 
writer for the barbarian, but that the Roman civilization 
assimilated instead of destroying, is, I take it, to be found 
not only in the fact that the ancient civilization was 
much nearer akin to the barbarians which it met, but in 
the more important fact that it was not extended as ours 
has been. It was carried forward, not by an advancing 
line of colonists, but by conquest which merely reduced 
the new province to general subjection, leaving the 
social, and generally the political organization of the 
people to a great degree unimpaired, so that, without 
shattering or deterioration, the process of assimilation 
went on. In a somewhat similar way the civilization of 
Japan seems to be now assimilating itself to European 
civilization. 

In America the Anglo-Saxon has exterminated, in- 
stead of civilizing, the Indian, simply because he has not- 
brought the Indian into his environment, nor yet has the 
contact been in such a way as to induce or permit the 
Indian web of habitual thought and custom to be 
changed rapidly enough to meet the new conditions into 
which he has been brought by the proximity of new and 
powerful neighbors. That there is no innate impedi- 
ment to the reception of our civilization by these un- 
civilized races has been shown over and over again in 
individual cases. And it has likewise been shown, so far 



500 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESSo Book X 

as the experiments have been permitted to go, by the 
Jesuits in Paraguay, the Franciscans in California, and 
the Protestant missionaries on some of the Pacific islands. 
The assumption of physical improvement in the race 
within any time of which we have knowledge is utterly 
without warrant, and within the time of which Mr. 
Bagehot speaks, it is absolutely disproved. We know 
from classic statues, from the burdens carried and the 
marches made by ancient soldiers, from the records of 
runners and the feats of gymnasts, that neither in pro- 
portions nor strength has the race improved within two 
thousand years. But the assumption of mental improve- 
ment, which is even more confidently and generally 
made, is still more preposterous. As poets, artists, 
architects, philosophers, rhetoricians, statesmen, or sol- 
diers, can modern civilization show individuals of greater 
mental power than can the ancient? There is no use 
in recalling names — every schoolboy knows them. For 
our models and personifications of mental power we go 
back to the ancients, and if we can for a moment 
imagine the possibility of what is held by that oldest and 
most widespread of all beliefs — that belief which Less- 
ing declared on this account the most probably true, 
though he accepted it on metaphysical grounds — and 
suppose Homer or Virgil, Demosthenes or Cicero, Alex- 
ander, Hannibal or Caesar, Plato or Lucretius, Euclid or 
Aristotle, as re-entering this life again in the Nineteenth 
Century, can we suppose that they would show any in- 
feriority to the men of to-day? Or if we take any period 
since the classic age, even the darkest, or any previous 
period of which we know anything, shall we not find 
men who in the conditions and degree of knowledge of 
their times showed mental power of as high an order as 
men show now? And among the less advanced races do 
we not to-day, whenever our attention is called to them, 
find men who in their conditions exhibit mental qualities 



Chap.n. DIFFERENCES IN CIVILIZATION. 501 

as great as civilization can show? Did the invention of 
the railroad, coming when it did, prove any greater in- 
ventive power than did the invention of the wheelbarrow 
when wheelbarrows w r ere not? We of modern civiliza- 
tion are raised far above those who have preceded us 
and those of the less advanced races who are our contem- 
poraries. But it is because we stand on a pyramid, not 
that w T e are taller. What the centuries have done for us 
is not to increase our stature, but to build up a structure 
on which we may plant our feet. 

Let me repeat: I do not mean to say that all men 
possess the same capacities, or are mentally alike, any 
more than I mean to say that they are physically alike. 
Among all the countless millions who have come and 
gone on this earth, there were probably never two who 
either physically or mentally w T ere exact counterparts. 
Nor yet do I mean to say that there are not as clearly 
marked race differences in mind as there are clearly 
marked race differences in body. I do no-t deny the 
influence of heredity in transmitting peculiarities of 
mind in the same way, and possibly to the same degree, 
as bodily peculiarities are transmitted. But neverthe- 
less, there is, it seems to me, a common standard and 
natural symmetry of mind, as there is of body, toward 
which all deviations tend to return. The conditions 
under which we fall may produce such distortions as the 
Flatheads produce by compressing the heads of their 
infants or the Chinese by binding their daughters' feet. 
But as Flathead babies continue to be born with naturally 
shaped heads and Chinese babies with naturally shaped 
feet, so does nature seem to revert to the normal mental 
type. A child no more inherits his father's knowledge 
than he inherits his father's glass eye or artificial leg; 
the child of the most ignorant parents may become a 
pioneer of science or a leader of thought. 

But this is the great fact with which we are concerned; 



502 - THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESSc Book X 

That the differences between the people of communities 
in different places and at different times, which we call 
differences of civilization, are not differences which inhere 
in the individuals, but differences which inhere in the 
society; that they are not, as Herbert Spencer holds, 
differences resulting from differences in the units; but 
that they are differences resulting from the conditions 
under which these units are brought in the society. In 
short, I take the explanation of the differences which dis- 
tinguish communities to be this: That each society, small 
or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, 
beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, and laws. 
Into this web, woven by each society, or rather, into these 
webs, for each community above the simplest is made up 
of minor societies, which overlap and interlace each 
other, the individual is received at birth and continues 
until his death. This is the matrix in which mind un- 
folds and from which it takes its stamp. This is the way 
in which customs, and religions, and prejudices, and 
tastes, and languages, grow up and are perpetuated. 
This is the way that skill is transmitted and knowledge 
is stored up, and the discoveries of one time made the 
common stock and stepping stone of the next. Though 
it is this that often offers the most serious obstacles to 
progress, it is this that makes progress possible. It is 
this that enables any schoolboy in our time to learn in a 
few hours more of the universe than Ptolemy knew; that 
places the most humdrum scientist far above the level 
reached by the giant mind of Aristotle. This is to the 
race what memory is to the individual. Our wonderful 
arts, our far-reaching science, our marvelous inventions 
— they have come through this. 

Human progress goes on as the advances made by one 
generation are in this way secured as the common prop- 
erty of the next, and made the starting point for new 
advances. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 

What, then, is the law of human progress — the law 
tinder which civilization advances? 

It must explain clearly and definitely, and not by 
vague generalities or superficial analogies, why, though 
mankind started presumably with the same capacities 
and at the same time, there now exist such wide differ- 
ences in social development. It must account for the 
arrested civilizations and for the decayed and destroyed 
civilizations; for the general facts as to the rise of civili- 
zation, and for the petrifying or enervating force which 
the progress of civilization has heretofore always evolved. 
It must account for retrogression as well as for progres- 
sion; for the differences in general character between 
Asiatic and European civilizations; for the difference 
between classical and modern civilizations; for the differ- 
ent rates at which progress goes on; and for those bursts, 
and starts, and halts of progress which are so marked as 
minor phenomena. And, thus, it must show us what 
are the essential conditions of progress, and what social 
adjustments advance and what retard it. 

It is not difficult to discover such a law. We have but 
to look and we may see it. I do not pretend to give it 
scientific precision, but merely to point it out. 

The incentives to progress are the desires inherent in 
human nature — the desire to gratify the wants of the 
animal nature, the wants of the intellectual nature, and 
the wants of the sympathetic nature; the desire to be, to 



504 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

know, and to do — desires that short of infinity can never 
be satisfied, as they grow by what they feed on. 

Mind is the instrument by which man advances, and by 
which each advance is secured and made the vantage 
ground for new advances. Though he may not by tak- 
ing thought add a cubit to his stature, man may by 
taking thought extend his knowledge of the universe 
and his power over it, in what, so far as we can see, is an 
infinite degree. The narrow span of human life allows 
the individual to go but a short distance, but though 
each generation may do but little, yet generations, suc- 
ceeding to the gain of their predecessors, may gradually 
elevate the status of mankind, as coral polyps, building 
one generation upon the work of the other, gradually 
elevate themselves from the bottom of the sea. 

Mental power is, therefore, the motor of progress, and 
men tend to advance in proportion to the mental power 
expended in progression — the mental power which is de- 
voted to the extension of knowledge, the improvement 
of methods, and the betterment of social conditions. 

Now mental power is a fixed quantity — that is to say, 
there is a limit to the work a man can do with his mind, as 
there is to the work he can do with his body; therefore, 
the mental power which can be devoted to progress is only 
what is left after what is required for non-progressive 
purposes. 

These non-progressive purposes in which mental power 
is consumed may be classified as maintenance and con- 
flict. By maintenance I mean, not only the support of 
existence, but the keeping up of the social condition and 
the holding of advances already gained. By conflict I 
mean not merely warfare and preparation for warfare, 
but all expenditure of mental power in seeking the grati- 
fication of desire at the expense of others, and in resist- 
ance to such aggression. 

To convpare society to a boat. Her progress through 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 505 

the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, 
but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This 
will be lessened by any expenditure of force required for 
bailing, or any expenditure of force in fighting among 
themselves, or in pulling in different directions. 

Now, as in a separated state the whole powers of man 
are required to maintain existence, and mental power is 
set free for higher uses only by the association of men 
in communities, which permits the division of labor and 
all the economies which come with the co-operation 
of increased numbers, association is the first essential of 
progress. Improvement becomes possible as men come 
together in peaceful association, and the wider and closer 
the association, the greater the possibilities of improve- 
ment. And as the wasteful expenditure of mental power 
in conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which 
accords to each an equality of rights is ignored or is 
recognized, equality (or justice) is the second essential of 
progress. 

Thus association in equality is the law of progress. 
Association frees mental power for expenditure in im- 
provement, and equality, or justice, or freedom — for the 
terms here signify the same thing, the recognition of the 
moral law — prevents the dissipation of this power in 
fruitless struggles. 

Here is the law of progress, which will explain all 
diversities, all advances, all halts, and retrogressions. 
Men tend to progress just as they come closer together, 
and by co-operation with each other increase the mental 
power that may be devoted to improvement, but just as 
conflict is provoked, or association develops inequality 
of condition and power, this tendency to progression is 
lessened, checked, and finally reversed. 

Given the same innate capacity, and it is evident that 
social development will go on faster or slower, will stop 
or turn back, according to the resistances it meets. Ii? 



506 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS, Book X 

a general way these obstacles to improvement may, in 
relation to the society itself, be classed as external and 
internal — the first operating with greater force in the 
earlier stages of civilization, the latter becoming more 
important in the later stages. 

Man is social in his nature. He does not require to be 
caught and tamed in order to induce him to live with 
his fellows. The utter helplessness with which he enters 
the world, and the long period required for the maturity 
of his powers, necessitate the family relation: which, as 
we may observe, is wider, and in its extensions stronger, 
among the ruder than among the more cultivated peo- 
ples. The first societies are families, expanding into 
tribes, still holding a mutual blood relationship, and even 
when they have become great nations claiming a common 
descent. 

Given beings of this kind, placed on a globe of such 
diversified surface and climate as this, and it is evident 
that, even with equal capacity, and an equal start, social 
development must be very different. The first limit or 
resistance to association will come from the conditions of 
physical nature, and as these greatly vary with locality, 
corresponding differences in social progress must show 
themselves. The net rapidity of increase, and the closeness 
with which men, as they increase, can keep together, 
will, in the rude state of knowledge in which reliance 
for subsistence must be principally upon the spontaneous 
offerings of nature, very largely depend upon climate, 
soil, and physical conformation. Where much animal 
food and warm clothing are required; where the earth 
seems poor and niggard; where the exuberant life of 
tropical forests mocKs barbarous man's puny efforts to 
control; where mountains, deserts, or arms of the sea 
separate and isolate men; association, and the power of 
improvement which it evolves, can at first go but a little 
way. But on the rich plains of warm climates, where 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 507 

human existence can be maintained with a smaller ex- 
penditure of force, and from a much smaller area, men 
can keep closer together, and the mental power which 
can at first be devoted to improvement is much greater. 
Hence civilization naturally first arises in the great val- 
leys and table lands where we find its earliest monuments. 
But these diversities in natural conditions, not merely 
thus directly produce diversities in social development, 
but, by producing diversities in social development, bring 
out in man himself an obstacle, or rather an active coun- 
terforce, to improvement. As families and tribes are 
separated from each other, the social feeling ceases to 
operate between them, and differences arise in language, 
custom, tradition, religion — in short, in the whole social 
web which each community, however small or large, con- 
stantly spins. With these differences, prejudices grow, 
animosities spring up, contact easily produces quarrels, 
aggression begets aggression, and wrong kindles re- 
venge.* And so between these separate social aggregates 
arises the feeling of Ishmael and the spirit of Cain, war- 
fare becomes the chronic and seemingly natural relation 
of societies to each other, and the powers of men are ex- 
pended in attack or defense, in mutual slaughter and 

*How easy it is for ignorance to pass into contempt and dislike; 
how natural it is for us to consider any difference in manners, cus- 
toms, religion, etc., as proof of the inferiority of those who differ 
from us, any one who has emancipated himself in any degree from 
prejudice, and who mixes with different classes, may see in civilized 
society. In religion, for instance, the spirit of the hymn — 

" I'd rather be a Baptist, and wear a shining face, 
Than for to be a Methodist and always fall from grace," 

is observable in all denominations. As the English Bishop said, 
"Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is any other doxy/' while 
the universal tendency is to classify all outside of the orthodoxies 
and heterodoxies of the prevailing religion as heathens or atheists. 
And the like tendency is observable as to all other differences. 



508 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X. 

mutual destruction of wealth, or in warlike preparations. 
How long this hostility persists, the protective tariffs 
and the standing armies of the civilized world to-day 
bear witness; how difficult it is to get over the idea that 
it is not theft to steal from a foreigner, the difficulty in 
procuring an international copyright act will show. Can 
we wonder at the perpetual hostilities of tribes and clans? 
Can we wonder that when each community was isolated 
from the others — when each, uninfluenced by the others, 
was spinning its separate web of social environment, 
which no individual can escape, that war should have 
been the rule and peace the exception? "They were 
even as we are." 

Now, warfare is the negation of association. The 
separation of men into diverse tribes, by increasing war- 
fare, thus checks improvement; while in the localities 
where a large increase in numbers is possible without 
much separation, civilization gains the advantage of ex- 
emption from tribal war, even when the community as a 
whole is carrying on warfare beyond its borders. Thus, 
where the resistance of nature to the close association of 
men is slightest, the counterforce of warfare is likely at 
first to be least felt; and in the rich plains where civili- 
zation first begins, it may rise to a great height while 
scattered tribes are yet barbarous. And thus, when 
small, separated communities exist in a state of chronic 
warfare which forbids advance, the first step to their civ- 
ilization is the advent of some conquering tribe or nation 
that unites these smaller communities into a larger one, in 
which internal peace is preserved. Where this power of 
peaceable association is broken up, either by external 
assaults or internal dissensions, the advance ceases and 
retrogression begins. 

But it is not conquest alone that has operated to pro- 
mote association, and, by liberating mental power from 
the necessities of warfare, to promote civilization. If 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 509 

the diversities of climate, soil, and configuration of the 
earth's surface operate at first to separate mankind, they 
also operate to encourage exchange. And commerce, 
which is in itself a form of association or co-operation, 
operates to promote civilization, not only directly, but 
by building up interests which are opposed to warfare, 
and dispelling the ignorance which is the fertile mother 
of prejudices and animosities. 

And so of religion. Though the forms it has assumed 
and the animosities it has aroused have often sundered 
men and produced warfare, yet it has at other times been 
the means of promoting association. A common worship 
has often, as among the Greeks, mitigated war and 
furnished the basis of union, while it is from the triumph 
of Christianity over the barbarians of Europe that modern 
civilization springs. Had not the Christian Church ex- 
isted when the Roman Empire went to pieces, Europe, 
destitute of any bond of association, might have fallen to 
a condition not much above that of the North American 
Indians or only received civilization with an Asiatic im- 
press from the conquering scimiters of the invading 
hordes which had been welded into a mighty power by a 
religion which, springing up in the deserts of Arabia, 
had united tribes separated from time immemorial, and, 
thence issuing, brought into the association of a common 
faith a great part of the human race. 

Looking over what we know of the history of the world, 
we thus see civilization everywhere springing up where 
men are brought into association, and everywhere disap- 
pearing as this association is broken up. Thus the 
Eoman civilization, spread over Europe by the conquests 
which insured internal peace, was overwhelmed by the 
incursions of the northern nations that broke society 
again into disconnected fragments; and the progress that 
now goes on in our modern civilization began as the 
feudal system again began to associate men in larger 



510 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X. 

communities, and the spiritual supremacy of Rome to 
bring these communities into a common relation, as her 
legions had done before. As the feudal bonds grew into 
national autonomies, and Christianity worked the amel- 
ioration of manners, brought forth the knowledge that 
during the dark days she had hidden, bound the threads 
of peaceful union in her all-pervading organization, and 
taught association in her religious orders, a greater prog- 
ress became possible, which, as men have been brought 
into closer and closer association and co-operation, has 
; gone on with greater and greater force. 

But we shall never understand the course of civiliza- 
tion, and the varied phenomena which its history presents* 
without a consideration of what I may term the internal 
resistances, or counter forces, which arise in the heart of 
advancing society, and which can alone explain how a 
civilization once fairly started should either come of itself 
to a halt or be destroyed by barbarians. 

The mental power, which is the motor of social prog- 
ress, is set free by association, which is, what, perhaps, 
it may be more properly called, an integration. Society 
in this process becomes more complex; its individuals 
more dependent upon each other. Occupations and 
functions are specialized. Instead of wandering, popu- 
lation becomes fixed. Instead of each man attempting 
to supply all of his wants, the various trades and indus- 
tries are separated — one man acquires skill in one thing, 
and another in another thing. So, too, of knowledge, 
the body of which constantly tends to become vaster than 
one man can grasp, and is separated into different parts, 
which different individuals acquire and pursue. So, too, 
the performance of religious ceremonies tends to pass 
into the hands of a body of men specially devoted to that 
purpose, and the preservation of order, tiie administra- 
tion of justice, the assignment of public duties and the 
distribution of awards, the conduce of war, etc., to be 



Chap.m. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 511 

made the special functions of an organized government. 
In short, to use the language in which Herbert Spencer 
has defined evolution, the development of society is, in 
relation to its component individuals, the passing from 
an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, 
coherent heterogeneity. The lower the stage of social 
development, the more society resembles one of those 
lowest of animal organisms which are without organs or 
limbs, and from which a part may be cut and yet live. 
The higher the stage of social development, the more 
society resembles those higher organisms in which func- 
tions and powers are specialized, and each member is 
vitally dependent on the others. 

Now, this process of integration, of the specialization 
of functions and powers, as it goes on in society, is, by 
virtue of what is probably one of the deepest laws of 
human nature, accompanied by a constant liability to 
inequality. I do not mean that inequality is the neces- 
sary result of social growth, but that it is the constant 
tendency of social growth if unaccompanied by changes 
in social adjustments, which, in the new conditions that 
growth produces, will secure equality. I mean, so to 
speak, that the garment of laws, customs, and political 
institutions, which each society weaves for itself, is con- 
stantly tending to become too tight as the society devel- 
ops. I mean, so to speak, that man, as he advances, 
threads a labyrinth, in which, if he keeps straight ahead, 
he will infallibly lose his way, and through which reason 
and justice can alone keep him continuously in an ascend- 
ing path. 

For, while the integration which accompanies growth 
tends in itself to set free mental power to work improve- 
ment, there is, both with increase of numbers and with 
increase in complexity of the social organization, a coun- 
ter tendency set up to the production of a state of in- 
equality, which wastes mental power, and, as it increases, 
brings improvement to a halt. 



512 , THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

To trace to its highest expression the law which thus 
operates to evolve with progress the force which stops 
progress, would be, it seems to me, to go far to the solu- 
tion of a problem deeper than that of the genesis of the 
material universe — the problem of the genesis of evil. 
Let me content myself with pointing out the manner in 
which, as society develops, there arise tendencies which 
check development. 

There are two qualities of human nature which it will 
be well, however, to first call to mind The one is the 
power of habit — the tendency to continue to do things in 
the same way; the other is the possibility of mental and 
moral deterioration. The effect of the first in social 
development is to continue habits, customs, laws and 
methods, long after they have lost their original useful- 
ness, and the effect of the other is to permit the growth 
of institutions and modes of thought from which the 
normal perceptions of men instinctively revolt. 

Now the growth and development of society not 
merely tend to make each more and more dependent 
upon all, and to lessen the influence of individuals, even 
over their own conditions, as compared with the influence 
of society; but the effect of association or integration is 
to give rise to a collective power which is distinguish- 
able from the sum of individual powers. Analogies, or, 
perhaps, rather illustrations of the same law, may be 
found in all directions. As animal organisms increase in 
complexity, there arise, above the life and power of the 
parts, a life and power of the integrated whole; above the 
capability of involuntary movements, the capability of 
voluntary movements. The actions and impulses of 
bodies of men are, as has often been observed, different 
from those which, under the same circumstances, would 
be called forth in individuals. The fighting qualities of 
a regiment may be very different from those of the in- 
dividual soldiers. But there is no need of illustrations. 



Chap. 111. THE LAW OF HUMAN PK0GRESS. 513 

In our inquiries into the nature and rise of rent, we 
traced the very thing to which I allude. Where popula- 
tion is sparse, land has no value; just as men congregate 
together, the value of land appears and rises — a clearly 
distinguishable thing from the values produced by in- • 
dividual effort; a value which springs from association, 
which increases as association grows greater, and disap- 
pears as association is broken up. And the same thing 
is true of power in other forms than those generally 
expressed in terms of wealth. 

Now, as society grows, the disposition to continue 
previous social adjustments tends to lodge this collective 
power, as it arises, in the hands of a portion of the com- 
munity; and this unequal distribution of the wealth and 
power gained as society advances tends to produce 
greater inequality, since aggression grows by what it 
feeds on, and the idea of justice is blurred by the habit- 
ual toleration of injustice. 

In this way * the patriarchal organization of society 
can easily grow into hereditary monarchy, in which the 
king is as a god on earth, and the masses of the people 
mere slaves of his caprice. It is natural that the father 
should be the directing head of the family, and that at 
his death the eldest son, as the oldest and most experi- 
enced member of the little community, should succeed to 
the headship. But to continue this arrangement as the 
family expands, is to lodge power in a particular line, 
and the power thus lodged necessarily continues to in- 
crease, as the common stock becomes larger and larger, 
and the power of the community grows. The head of 
the family passes into the hereditary king, who comes to 
look upon himself and to be looked upon by others as a 
being of superior rights. With the growth of the collec- 
tive power as compared with the power of the individual, 
his power to reward and to punish increases, and so in- 
crease the inducements to flatter and to fear him; until 



514 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

finally, if the process be not disturbed, a nation grovels 
at the foot of a throne, and a hundred thousand men toil 
for fifty years to prepare a tomb for one of their own 
mortal kind. 

So the war-chief of a little band of savages is but one 
of their number, whom they follow as their bravest and 
most wary. But when large bodies come to act together, 
personal selection becomes more difficult, a blinder 
obedience becomes necessary and can be enforced, and 
from the very necessities of warfare when conducted on 
a large scale absolute power arises. 

And so of the specialization of function. There is a 
manifest gain in productive power when social growth 
has gone so far that instead of every producer being sum- 
moned from his work for fighting purposes, a regular 
military force can be specialized; but this inevitably 
tends to the concentration of power in the hands of the 
military class or their chiefs. The preservation of in- 
ternal order, the administration of justice, the construc- 
tion and care of public works, and, notably, the observ- 
ances of religion, all tend in similar manner to pass into 
the hands of special classes, whose disposition it is to 
magnify their function and extend their power. 

But the great cause of inequality is in the natural 
monopoly which is given by the possession of land. The 
first perceptions of men seem always to be that land is 
common property; but the rude devices by which this is 
at first recognized — such as annual partitions or cultiva- 
tion in common — are consistent with only a low stage of 
development. The idea of property, which naturally 
arises with reference to things of human production, is 
easily transferred to land, and an institution which when 
population is sparse merely secures to the improver and 
user the due reward of his labor, finally, as population 
becomes dense and rent arises, operates to strip the pro- 
ducer of his wages. Not merely this, but the appropria- 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 515 

tion of rent for public purposes, which is the only way 
in which, with anything like a high development, land 
can be readily retained as common property, becomes, 
when political and religious power passes into the hands 
of a class, the ownership of the land by that class, and 
the rest of the community become merely tenants. And 
wars and conquests, which tend to the concentration of 
political power and to the institution of slavery, naturally 
result, where social growth has given land a value, in 
the appropriation of the soil. A dominant class, who 
concentrate power in their hands, will likewise soon con- 
centrate ownership of the land. To them will fall large 
partitions of conquered land, which the former inhabit- 
ants will till as tenants or serfs, and the public domain, 
or common lands, which in the natural course of social 
growth are left for awhile in every country, and in which 
state the primitive system of village culture leaves 
pasture and woodland, are readily acquired, as we see by 
modern instances. And inequality once established, the 
ownership of land tends to concentrate as development 
goes on. 

I am merely attempting to set forth the general fact 
that as a social development goes on, inequality tends 
to establish itself, and not to point out the particular 
sequence, which must necessarily vary with different con- 
ditions. But this main fact makes intelligible all the 
phenomena of petrifaction and retrogression. The unequal 
distribution of the power and wealth gained by the in- 
tegration of men in society tends to check, and finally to 
counterbalance, the force by which improvements are 
made and society advances. On the one side, the masses 
of the community are compelled to expend their mental 
powers in merely maintaining existence. On the other 
side, mental power is expended in keeping up and inten- 
sifying the system of inequality, in ostentation, luxury, 
and warfare. A community divided into a class that 



516 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X 

rules and a class that is ruled — into the very rich and the 
very poor, may "build like giants and finish like jewel- 
ers;" but it will be monuments of ruthless pride and 
barren vanity, or of a religion turned from its office of 
elevating man into an instrument for keeping him down. 
Invention may for awhile to some degree go on; but it 
will be the invention of refinements in luxury, not the 
inventions that relieve toil and increase power. In the 
arcana of temples or in the chambers of court physicians 
knowledge may still be sought; but it will be hidden as a 
secret thing, or if it dares come out to elevate common 
thought or brighten common life, it will be trodden 
down as a dangerous innovator. For as it tends to lessen 
the mental power devoted to improvement, so does in- 
equality tend to render men adverse to improvement. 
How strong is the disposition to adhere to old methods 
among the classes who are kept in ignorance by being 
compelled to toil for a mere existence, is too well known 
to require illustration, and on the other hand the con- 
servatism of the classes to whom the existing social 
adjustment gives special advantages is equally apparent. 
This tendency to resist innovation, even though it be 
improvement, is observable in every special organization 
— in religion, in law, in medicine, in science, in trade 
guilds; and it becomes intense just as the organization 
is close. A close corporation has always an instinctive 
dislike of innovation and innovators, which is but the 
expression of an instinctive fear that change may tend to 
throw down the barriers which hedge it in from the com- 
mon herd, and so rob it of importance and power; and it 
is always disposed to guard carefully its special knowl- 
edge or skill. 

It is in this way that petrifaction succeeds progress. 
The advance of inequality necessarily brings improve- 
ment to a halt, and as it still persists or provokes 
unavailing reactions, draws even upon the mental power 
necessary for maintenance, and retrogression begins. 



Chap.UI. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 517 

These principles make intelligible the history of civili- 
zation. 

In the localities where climate, soil, and physical con- 
formation tended least to separate men as they increased, 
and where, accordingly, the first civilizations grew up, 
the internal resistances to progress would naturally 
develop in a more regular and thorough manner than 
inhere smaller communities, which in their separation 
had developed diversities, were afterward brought to- 
gether into a closer association. It is this, it seems to 
me, which accounts for the general characteristics of the 
earlier civilizations as compared with the later civiliza- 
tions of Europe. Such homogeneous communities, devel- 
oping from the first without the jar of conflict between 
different customs, laws, religions, etc., would show a 
much greater uniformity. The concentrating and con- 
servative forces would all, so to speak, pull together. 
Eival chieftains would not counterbalance each other, 
nor diversities of belief hold the growth of priestly 
influence in check. Political and religious power, wealth 
and knowledge, would thus tend to concentrate in the 
same centers. The same causes which tended to pro- 
duce the hereditary king and hereditary, priest would 
tend to produce the hereditary artisan and laborer, and 
to separate society into castes. The power which associa- 
tion sets free for progress would thus be wasted, and 
barriers to further progress be gradually raised. The sur- 
plus energies of the masses would be devoted to the con- 
struction of temples, palaces, and pyramids; to minister- 
ing to the pride and pampering the luxury of their rulers; 
and should any disposition to improvement arise among 
the classes of leisure it would at once be checked by the 
dread of innovation. Society developing in this way 
must at length stop in a conservatism which permits no 
further progress. 

How long such a state of complete petrifaction, when 



518 • THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

once reached, will continue, seems to depend upon ex* 
ternal causes, for the iron bonds of the social environ- 
ment which grows up repress disintegrating forces as 
well as improvement. Such a community can be most 
easily conquered, for the masses of th<? people are trained 
to a passive acquiescence in a life of hopeless labor. If 
the conquerors merely take the place of the ruling class, 
as the Hyksos did in Egypt and the Tartars in China, 
everything will go on as before. If they ravage and de- 
stroy, the glory of palace and temple remains but in 
ruins, population becomes sparse, and knowledge and 
art are lost. 

European civilization differs in character from civiliza* 
tions of the Egyptian type because it springs not from 
the association of a homogeneous people developing 
from the beginning, or at least for a long time, under 
the same conditions, but from the association of peoples 
who in separation had acquired distinctive social char- 
acteristics, and whose smaller organizations longer pre- 
vented the concentration of power and wealth in one 
center. The physical conformation of the Grecian pen- 
insula is such as to separate the people at first into a 
number of small communities. As those petty republics 
and nominal kingdoms ceased to waste their energies in 
warfare, and the peaceable co-operation of commerce ex- 
tended, the light of civilization blazed up. But the 
principle of association was never strong enough to save 
Greece from inter-tribal war, and when this was put an 
end to by conquest, the tendency to inequality, which 
had been combated with various devices by Grecian sages 
and statesmen, worked its result, and Grecian valor, 
art, and literature became things of the past. And 
so in the rise and extension, the decline and fall, of 
Koman civilization, may be seen the working of these 
two principles of association and equality, from the 
combination of which springs progress. 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 519 

Springing from the association of the independent 
husbandmen and free citizens of Italy, and gaining fresh 
strength from conquests which brought hostile nations 
into common relations, the Roman power hushed the 
world in peace. But the tendency to inequality, check* 
ing real progress from the first, increased as the Eoman 
civilization extended. The Eoman civilization did not 
petrify as did the homogeneous civilizations where the 
strong bonds of custom and superstition that held the 
people in subjection probably also protected them, or at 
any rate kept the peace between rulers and ruled; it 
rotted, declined and fell. Long before Goth or Vandal 
had broken through the cordon of the legions, even while 
her frontiers were advancing, Rome was dead at the 
heart. Great estates had ruined Italy. Inequality had 
dried up the strength and destroyed the vigor of the 
Roman world. Government became despotism, which 
even assassination could not temper; patriotism became 
servility; vices the most foul flouted themselves in pub- 
lic; literature sank to puerilities; learning was forgotten; 
fertile districts became waste without the ravages of war 
— everywhere inequality produced decay, political, men- 
tal, moral, and material. The barbarism which over- 
whelmed Rome came not from without, but from within. 
It was the necessary product of the system which had 
substituted slaves and colonii for the independent hus- 
bandmen of Italy, and carved the provinces into estates 
of senatorial families. 

Modern civilization owes its superiority to the growth 
of equality with the growth of association. Two great 
causes contributed to this — the splitting up of concen- 
trated power into innumerable little centers by the influx 
of the Northern nations, and the influence of Christian- 
ity. Without the first there would have been the petri- 
faction and slow decay of the Eastern Empire, where 
church and state were closely married and loss of exter- 



520 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh 

nal power brought no relief of internal tyranny. And 
but for the other there would have been barbarism, 
without principle of association or amelioration. The 
petty chiefs and allodial lords who everywhere grasped 
local sovereignty held each other in check. Italian cities 
recovered their ancient liberty, free towns were founded, 
village communities took root, and serfs acquired 
rights in the soil they tilled. The leaven of Teutonic 
ideas of equality worked through the disorganized and 
disjointed fabric of society. And although society was 
split up into an innumerable number of separated 
fragments, yet the idea of closer association was always 
present — it existed in the recollections of a universal 
empire; it existed in the claims of a universal church. 

Though Christianity became distorted and alloyed in 
percolating through a rotting civilization; though 
pagan gods were taken into her pantheon, and pagan 
forms into her ritual, and pagan ideas into her creed; 
yet her essential idea of the equality of men was never 
wholly destroyed. And two things happened of the 
utmost moment to incipient civilization — the establish 
ment of the papacy and the celibacy of the clergy. The 
first prevented the spiritual power from concentrating in 
the same lines as the temporal power; and the latter 
prevented the establishment of a priestly caste, during a 
time when all power tended to hereditary form. 

In her efforts for the abolition of slavery; in her Truce 
of God; in her monastic orders; in her councils which 
united nations, and her edicts which ran without regard 
to political boundaries; in the low-born hands in which 
she placed a sign before which the proudest knelt; in her 
bishops who by consecration became the peers of the 
greatest nobles; in her "Servant of Servants," for so 
his official title ran, who, by virtue of the ring of a simple 
fisherman, claimed the right to arbitrate between nations, 
and whose stirrup was held by kings; the Church, in 



Chap. 111. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 521 

spite of everything., was yet a promoter of association, a 
witness for the natural equality of men; and by the 
Church herself was nurtured a spirit that, when her early 
work of association and emancipation was well-nigh done 
< — when the ties she had knit had become strong, and the 
learning she had preserved had been given to the world — - 
broke the chains with which she would have fettered the 
human mind, and in a great part of Europe rent her 
organization. 

The rise and growth of European civilization is too 
vast and complex a subject to be thrown into proper per- 
spective and relation in a few paragraphs; but in all its 
details, as in its main features, it illustrates the truth 
that progress goes on just as society tends toward closer 
association and greater equality. Civilization is co- 
operation. Union and liberty are its factors. The great 
extension of association — not alone in the growth of 
larger and denser communities, but in the increase of 
commerce and the manifold exchanges which knit each 
community together and link them with other though 
widely separated communities; the growth of interna- 
tional and municipal law; the advances in security of 
property and of person, in individual liberty, and towards 
democratic government — advances, in short, towards the 
recognition of the equal rights to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness — it is these that make our modern 
civilization so much greater, so much higher, than any 
that has gone before. It is these that have set free the 
mental power which has rolled back the veil of ignorance 
which hid all but a small portion of the globe from men's 
knowledge; which has measured the orbits of the circling 
spheres and bids us see moving, pulsing life in a drop of 
water; which has opened to us the antechamber of 
nature's mysteries and read the secrets of a long-buried 
past; which has harnessed in our service physical forces 
beside which man's efforts are puny; and increased pro- 
ductive power by a thousand great inventions. 



522 * THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

In that spirit of fatalism to which I have alluded as 
pervading current literature, it is the fashion to speak 
even of war and slavery as means of human progress. 
But war, which is the opposite of association, can aid 
progress only when it prevents further war or breaks 
down anti-social barriers which are themselves passive 
war. 

As for slavery, I cannot see how it could ever have 
aided in establishing freedom, and freedom, the synonym 
of equality, is, from the very rudest state in which man 
can be imagined, the stimulus and condition of progress. 
Auguste Comte's idea that the institution of slavery de- 
stroyed cannibalism is as fanciful as Elia's humorous 
notion of the way mankind acquired a taste for roast pig. 
It assumes that a propensity that has never been found 
developed in man save as the result of the most un- 
natural conditions — the direst want or the most brutaliz- 
ing superstitions* — is an original impulse, and that he, 
even in his lowest state the highest of all animals, has 
natural appetites which the nobler brutes do not show. 
And so of the idea that slavery began civilization by 
giving slave owners leisure for improvement. 

Slavery never did and never could aid improvement. 
Whether the community consist of a single master and a 
single slave, or of thousands of masters and millions of 
slaves, slavery necessarily involves a waste of human 
power; for not only is slave labor less productive than 
free labor, but the power of masters is likewise wasted in 
holding and watching their slaves, and is called away 
from directions in which real improvement lies. From 
first to last, slavery, like every other denial of the natural 

* The Sandwich Islanders did honor to their good chiefs by eating 
their bodies. Their bad and tyrannical chiefs they would not 
touch. The New Zealanders had a notion that by eating their ene- 
mies they acquired their strength and valor. And this seems to be 
the general origin of eating prisoners of war. 



Chap. III. THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. 523 

equality of men, has hampered and prevented progress. 
Just in proportion as slavery plays an important part in 
the social organization does improvement cease. That 
in the classical world slavery was so universal, is un- 
doubtedly the reason why the mental activity which so 
polished literature and refined art never hit on any of 
the great discoveries and inventions which distinguish 
modern civilization. No slave-holding people ever were 
an inventive people. In a slave-holding community the 
upper classes may become luxurious and polished; but 
never inventive. Whatever degrades the laborer and 
robs him of the fruits of his toil stifles the spirit of 
invention and forbids the utilization of inventions and 
discoveries even when made. To freedom alone is given 
the spell of power which summons the genii in whose 
keeping are the treasures of earth and the viewless forces 
of the air. 

The law of human progress, what is it but the moral 
law? Just as social adjustments promote justice, just as 
they acknowledge the equality of right between man and 
man, just as they insure to each the perfect liberty which 
is bounded only by the equal liberty of every other, must 
civilization advance. Just as they fail in this, must 
advancing civilization come to a halt and recede. Polit- 
ical economy and social science cannot teach any lessons 
that are not embraced in the simple truths that were 
taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One 
who eighteen hundred years ago was crucified — the sim- 
ple truths which, beneath the warpings of selfishness and 
the distortions of superstition, seem to underlie every 
religion that has ever striven to formulate the spiritual 
yearnings of man. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE,, 

The conclusion we have thus reached harmonizes com- 
pletely with our previous conclusions. 

This consideration of the law of human progress not 
only brings the politico-economic laws, which in this in- 
quiry we have worked out, within the scope of a higher 
law — perhaps the very highest law our minds can grasp — 
but it proves that the making of land common property 
in the way I have proposed would give an enormous im- 
petus to civilization, while the refusal to do so must en- 
tail retrogression. A civilization like ours must either 
advance or go back; it cannot stand still. It is not like 
those homogeneous civilizations, such as that of the Nile 
Valley, which molded men for their places and put them 
in it like bricks into a pyramid. It much more resembles 
that civilization whose rise and fall is within historic 
times, and from which it sprung. 

There is just now a disposition to scoff at any impli- 
cation that we are not in all respects progressing, and 
the spirit of our times is that of the edict which the flat- 
tering premier proposed to the Chinese Emperor who 
burned the ancient books — "that all who may dare to 
speak together about the She and the Shoo be put to 
death; that those who make mention of the past so as 
to blame the present be put to death along with their 
relatives. " 

Yet it is evident that there have been times of de- 
cline, just as there have been times of advance; and it is 
further evident that these epochs of decline could not at 
first have been generally recognized, 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 525 

He would have been a rash man who, when Augustus 
was changing the Eome of brick to the Rome of marble, 
when wealth was augmenting and magnificence increas- 
ing, when victorious legions were extending the frontier, 
when manners were becoming more refined, language 
more polished, and literature rising to higher splendors 
— he would have been a rash man who then would have 
said that Eome was entering her decline. Yet such was 
the case. 

And whoever will look may see that though our civili- 
zation is apparently advancing with greater rapidity than 
ever, the same cause which turned Roman progress into 
retrogression is operating now. 

What has destroyed every previous civilization has 
been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth 
and power. This same tendency, operating with in- 
creasing force, is observable in our civilization to-day, 
showing itself in every progressive community, and with 
greater intensity the more progressive the community. 
Wages and interest tend constantly to fall, rent to rise, 
the rich to become very much richer, the poor to become 
more helpless and hopeless, and the middle class to be 
swept away. 

I have traced this tendency to its cause. I have shown 
by what simple means this cause may be removed. I 
now wish to point out how, if this is not done, progress 
must turn to decadence, and modern civilization decline 
to barbarism, as have all previous civilizations. It is 
worth while to point out how this may occur, as many 
people, being unable to see how progress may pass into 
retrogression, conceive such a thing impossible. Gibbon, 
for instance, thought that modern civilization could 
never be destroyed because there remained no barbarians 
to overrun it, and it is a common idea that the inven- 
tion of printing by so multiplying books has prevented 
the possibility of knowledge ever again being lost. 



526 r THE LAW OF HUMAST PKOGRESS. Book X 

The conditions of social progress, as we have traced 
the law, are association and equality. The general 
tendency of modern development, since the time when 
we can first discern the gleams of civilization in the 
darkness which followed the fall of the Western Empire, 
has been toward political and legal equality — to the 
abolition of slavery; to the abrogation of status; to the 
sweeping away of hereditary privileges; to the substitu- 
tion of parliamentary for arbitrary government; to the 
right of private judgment in matters of religion; to the 
more equal security in person and property of high and 
low, weak and strong; to the greater freedom of move- 
ment and occupation, of speech and of the press. The 
history of modern civilization is the history of advances 
in this direction — of the struggles and triumphs of per- 
sonal, political, and religious freedom. And the general 
law is shown by the fact that just as this tendency ha& 
asserted itself civilization has advanced, while just as it 
has been repressed or forced back civilization has been 
checked. 

This tendency has reached its full expression in the 
American Kepublic, where political and legal rights are 
absolutely equal, and, owing to the system of rotation in 
office, even the growth of a bureaucracy is prevented; 
where every religious belief or non-belief stands on the 
same footing; where every boy may hope to be President, 
every man has an equal voice in public affairs, and every 
official is mediately or immediately dependent for the 
short lease of his place upon a popular vote. This tend- 
ency has yet some triumphs to win in England, in 
extending the suffrage, and sweeping away the vestiges of 
monarchy, aristocracy, and prelacy; while in such countries 
as Germany and Kussia, where divine right is yet a good 
deal more than a legal fiction, it has a considerable dis- 
tance to go. But it is the prevailing tendency, and how 
soon Europe will be completely republican is only a mat- 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 527 

ter of time, or rather of accident. The United States 
are therefore, in this respect, the most advanced of all 
the great nations, in a direction in which all are advanc- 
ing, and in the United States we see just how much this 
tendency to personal and political freedom can of itself 
accomplish. 

Now, the first effect of the tendency to political equal- 
ity was to the more equal distribution of wealth and 
power; for, while population is comparatively sparse, 
inequality in the distribution of wealth is principally due 
to the inequality of personal rights, and it is only as 
material progress goes on that the tendency to inequality 
involved in the reduction of land to private ownership 
strongly appears. But it is now manifest that absolute 
political equality does not in itself prevent the tendency 
to inequality involved in the private ownership of land, 
and it is further evident that political equality, co-existing 
with an increasing tendency to the unequal distribution 
of wealth, must ultimately beget either the despotism 
of organized tyranny or the worse despotism of anarchy. 

To turn a republican government into a despotism the 
basest and most brutal, it is not necessary formally to 
change its constitution or abandon popular elections. It 
was centuries after Cassar before the absolute master of the 
Eoman world pretended to rule other than by authority 
of a Senate that trembled before him. 

But forms are nothing when substance has gone, and 
the forms of popular government are those from which 
the substance of freedom may most easily go. Extremes 
meet, and a government of universal suffrage and theo- 
retical equality may, under donditions which impel the 
change, most readily become a despotism. For there 
despotism advances in the name and with the might 
of the people. The single source of power once secured, 
everything is secured. There is no unfranchised class 
to whom appeal may be made, no privileged orders who 



528 THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X 

in defending their own rights may defend those of 
all. No bulwark remains to stay the flood, no eminence 
to rise above it. They were belted barons led by a mitered 
archbishop who curbed the Plantagenet with Magna 
Charta; it was the middle classes who broke the pride of 
the Stuarts; but a mere aristocracy of wealth will never 
struggle while it can hope to bribe a tyrant. 

And when the disparity of condition increases, so does 
universal suffrage make it easy to seize the source of power, 
for the greater is the proportion of power in the hands 
of those who feel no direct interest in the conduct of 
government; who, tortured by want and embruted by 
poverty, are ready to sell their votes to the highest bid- 
der or follow the lead of the most blatant demagogue; or 
who, made bitter by hardships, may even look upon prof- 
ligate and tyrannous government with the satisfaction 
we may imagine the proletarians and slaves of Eome to 
have felt, as they saw a Caligula or Nero raging among 
the rich patricians. Given a community with republican 
institutions, in which one class is too rich to be shorn of 
its luxuries, no matter how public affairs are adminis- 
tered, and another so poor that a few dollars on election 
day will seem more than any abstract consideration; in 
which the few roll in wealth and the many seethe with 
discontent at a condition of things they know not how 
to remedy, and power must pass into the hands of job- 
bers who will buy and sell it as the Praetorians sold the 
Roman purple, or into the hands of demagogues who 
will seize and wield it for a time, only to be displaced by 
worse demagogues. 

Where there is anything like an equal distribution of 
wealth — that is to say, where there is general patriotism, 
virtue, and intelligence — the more democratic the gov- 
ernment the better it will be; but where there is gross 
inequality in the distribution of wealth, the more demo- 
cratic the government the worse it will be; for, while 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 529 

rotten democracy may not in itself be worse than rotten 
autocracy, its effects upon national character will be 
worse. To give the suffrage to tramps, to paupers, to 
men to whom the chance to labor is a boon, to men who 
must beg, or steal, or starve, is to invoke destruction. 
To put political power in the hands of men embittered 
and degraded by poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and 
turn them loose amid the standing corn; it is to put out 
the eyes of a Samson and to twine his arms around the 
pillars of national life. 

Even the accidents of hereditary succession or of selec- 
tion by lot, the plan of some of the ancient republics, 
may sometimes place the wise and just in power; but in 
a corrupt democracy the tendency is always to give power 
to the worst. Honesty and patriotism are weighted, and 
unscrupulousness commands success. The best gravitate 
to the bottom, the worst float to the top, and the vile will 
only be ousted by the viler. While as national character 
must gradually assimilate to the qualities that win power, 
and consequently respect, that demoralization of opinion 
goes on which in the long panorama of history we may 
see over and over again transmuting races of freemen 
into races of slaves. 

As in England in the last century, when Parliament 
was but a close corporation of the aristocracy, a corrupt 
oligarchy clearly fenced off from the masses may exist 
without much effect on national character, because in 
that case power is associated in the popular mind with 
other things than corruption. But where there are no 
hereditary distinctions, and men are habitually seen to 
raise themselves by corrupt qualities from the lowest 
places to wealth and power, tolerance of these qualities 
finally becomes admiration. A corrupt democratic gov- 
ernment must finally corrupt the people, and when a 
people become corrupt there is no resurrection. The 
l?fe is gone, only the carcass remains; and it is left but 
for the plowshares of fate to bury it out of sight. 



530 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

Now this tranformation of popular government into 
despotism of the vilest and most degrading kind, which 
must inevitably result from the unequal distribution of 
wealth, is not a thing of the far future. It has already 
begun in the United States, and is rapidly going on 
under our eyes. That our legislative bodies are steadily 
deteriorating in standard; that men of the highest abil- 
ity and character are compelled to eschew politics, and 
the arts of the jobber count for more than the reputa- 
tion of the statesman; that voting is done more reck- 
lessly and the power of money is increasing; that it is 
harder to arouse the people to the necessity of reforms 
and more difficult to carry them out; that political differ- 
ences are ceasing to be differences of principle, and 
abstract ideas are losing their power; that parties are 
passing into the control of what in general government 
would be oligarchies and dictatorships; are all evidences 
of political decline. 

The type of modern growth is the great city. Here 
are to be found the greatest wealth and the deepest pov- 
erty. And it is here that popular government has most 
clearly broken down. In all the great American cities 
there is to-day as clearly defined a ruling class as in the 
most aristocratic countries of the world. Its members 
carry wards in their pockets, make up the slates for 
nominating conventions, distribute offices as they bar- 
gain together, and — though they toil not, neither do 
they spin — wear the best of raiment and spend money 
lavishly. They are men of power, whose favor the ambi- 
tious must court and whose vengeance he must avoid. 
Who are these men? The wise, the good, the learned — 
men who have earned the confidence of their fellow- 
citizens by the purity of their lives, the splendor of their 
talents, their probity in public trusts, their deep study 
of the problems of government? No; they are gamblers, 
saloon keepers, pugilists, or worse, who have made a 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 531 

trade of controlling votes and of buying and selling 
offices and official acts. They stand to the government 
of these cities as the Pratorian Guards did to that of 
declining Eome. He who would wear the purple, fill 
the curule chair, or have the fasces carried before him, 
must go or send his messengers to their camps, give them 
donatives and make them promises. It is through these 
men that the rich corporations and powerful pecuniary 
interests can pack the Senate and the bench with their 
creatures. It is these men who make School Directors, 
Supervisors, Assessors, members of the Legislature, Con- 
gressmen. Why, there are many election districts in 
the United States in which a George Washington, a Ben- 
jamin Franklin or a Thomas Jefferson could no more go 
to the lower house of a State Legislature than under the 
Ancient Kegime a base-born peasant could become a 
Marshal of France. Their very character would be an 
insuperable disqualification. 

In theory we are intense democrats. The proposal to 
sacrifice swine in the temple would hardly have excited 
greater horror and indignation in Jerusalem of old than 
would among us that of conferring a distinction of rank 
upon our most eminent citizen. But is there not grow- 
ing up among us a class who have all the power without 
any of the virtues of aristocracy? We have simple citi- 
zens who control thousands of miles of railroad, millions 
of acres of land, the means of livelihood of great numbers 
of men; who name the Governors of sovereign States as 
they name their clerks, choose Senators as they choose 
attorneys, and whose will is as supreme with Legislatures 
as that of a French King sitting in bed of justice. The 
undercurrents of the times seem to sweep us back again 
to the old conditions from which we dreamed we had 
escaped. The development of the artisan and commer- 
cial classes gradually broke down feudalism after it had 
become so complete that men thought of heaven as 



532 THE LAW OF HUMAN" PROGRESS. Book X. 

organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and 
second persons of the Trinity as suzerain and tenant-in- 
chief. But now the development of manufactures and 
exchange, acting in a social organization in which land 
is made private property, threatens to compel every 
worker to seek a master, as the insecurity which followed 
the final break-up of the Eoman Empire compelled every 
freeman to seek a lord. Nothing seems exempt from 
this tendency. Industry everywhere tends to assume a 
form in which one is master and many serve. And when 
one is master and the others serve, the one will control 
the others, even in such matters as votes. Just as the 
English landlord votes his tenants, so does the New 
England mill owner vote his operatives. 

There is no mistaking it — the very foundations of 
society are being sapped before our eyes, while we ask, 
how is it possible that such a civilization as this, with its 
railroads, and daily newspapers, and electric telegraphs, 
should ever be destroyed? While literature breathes but 
the belief that we have been, are, and for the future 
must be, leaving the savage state further and further 
behind us, there are indications that we are actually 
turning back again toward barbarism. Let me illus- 
trate: One of the characteristics of barbarism is the low 
regard for the rights of person and of property. That 
the laws of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors imposed as penalty 
for murder a fine proportioned to the rank of the victim, 
while our law knows no distinction of rank, and protects 
the lowest from the highest, the poorest from the richest, 
by the uniform penalty of death, is looked upon as evi- 
dence of their barbarism and our civilization. And so, 
that piracy, and robbery, and slave-trading, and black- 
mailing, were once regarded as legitimate occupations, 
is conclusive proof of the rude state of development from 
which we have so far progressed. 

But it is a matter of fact that, in spite of our laws, any 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 533 

one who has money enough and wants to kill another 
may go into any one of our great centers of population 
and business, and gratiry his desire, and then surrender 
himself to justice, with the chances as a hundred to one 
that he will suffer no greater penalty than a temporary 
imprisonment and the loss of a sum proportioned partly 
to his own wealth and partly to the wealth and standing 
of the man he kills. His money will be paid, not to the 
family of the murdered man, who have lost their protec- 
tor; not to the state, which lias lost a citizen; but to 
lawyers who understand how to secure delays, to find 
witnesses, and get juries to disagree. 

And so, if a man steal enough, he may be sure that his 
punishment will practically amount but to the loss of a 
part of the proceeds of his theft; and if he steal enough 
to get off with a fortune, he will be greeted by his ac- 
quaintances as a viking might have been greeted after a 
successful cruise. Even though he robbed those who 
trusted him; even though he robbed the widow and the 
fatherless; he has only to get enough, and he may safely 
flaunt his wealth in the eyes of day. 

Now, the tendency in this direction is an increasing 
one. It is shown in greatest force where the inequalities 
in the distribution of wealth are greatest, and it shows 
itself as they increase. If it be not a return to barbar- 
ism, what is it? The failures of justice to which I have 
alluded are only illustrative of the increasing debility 
of our legal machinery in every department. It is 
becoming common to hear men say that it would be 
better to revert to first principles and abolish law, for 
then in self-defense the people would form Vigilance 
Committees and take justice into their own hands. Is 
this indicative of advance or retrogression? 

All this is matter of common observation. Though 
we may not speak it openly, the general faith in repub- 
lican institutions is, where they have reached their fullest 



534 THE LAW OF HU1IAX PROGRESS. Book X. 

development, narrowing and weakening. It is no longer 
that confident belief in republicanism as the source of 
national blessings that it once was. Thoughtful men 
are beginning to see its dangers, without seeing how to 
escape them; are beginning to accept the view of Macau- 
lay and distrust that of Jefferson.* And the people at 
large are becoming used to the growing corruption. The 
most ominous political sign in the United States to-day 
is the growth of a sentiment which either doubts the 
existence of an honest man in public office or looks on 
him as a fool for not seizing his opportunities. That is 
to say, the people themselves are becoming corrupted. 
Thus in the United States to-day is republican govern- 
ment running the course it must inevitably follow under 
conditions which cause the unequal distribution of 
wealth. 

Where that course leads is clear to whoever will think. 
As corruption becomes chronic; as public spirit is lost; 
as traditions of honor, virtue, and patriotism are weak- 
ened; as law is brought into contempt and reforms 
become hopeless; then in the festering mass will be gen- 
erated volcanic forces, which shatter and rend when 
seeming accident gives them vent. Strong, unscrupulous 
men, rising up upon occasion, will become the exponents 
of blind popular desires or fierce popular passions, and 
dash aside forms that have lost their vitality. The sword 
will again be mightier than the pen, and in carnivals of 
destruction brute force and wild frenzy will alternate 
with the lethargy of a declining civilization. 

I speak of the United States only because the United 
States is the most advanced of all the great nations. 
What shall we say of Europe, where dams of ancient law 
and custom pen up the swelling waters and standing 
armies weigh down the safety valves, though year by 

* See Macaulay's letter to Randall, the biographer of Jefferson. 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 535 

year the Sres grow hotter underneath? Europe tends to 
republicanism under conditions that will not admit of 
true republicanism — under conditions that substitute for 
the calm and august figure of Liberty the petroleuse and 
the guillotine! 

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through 
the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, 
even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning 
perish? Men will cease to read, and b^oks will kindle 
fires and be turned into cartridges! 

It is startling to think how slight the traces that would 
be left of our civilization did it pass through the throes 
which have accompanied the decline of every previous 
civilization. Paper will not last like parchment, nor are 
our most massive buildings and monuments to be com- 
pared in solidity with the rock-hewn temples and titanic 
edifices of the old civilizations.* And invention has 
given us, not merely the steam engine and the printing 
press, but petroleum, nitro-glycerine, and dynamite. 

Yet to hint, to-day, that our civilization may possibly 
be tending to decline, seems like the wildness of pessi- 
mism. The special tendencies to which I have alluded are 
obvious to thinking men, but with the majority of think- 
ing men, as with the great masses, the belief in substan- 
tial progress is yet deep and strong — a fundamental belief 
which admits not the shadow of a doubt. 

But any one who will think over the matter will see 
that this must necessarily be the case where advance 
gradually passes into retrogression. For in social devel- 
opment, as in everything else, motion tends to persist in 
straight lines, and therefore, where there has been a 

*It is also, it seems to me, instructive to note how inadequate and 
utterly misleading would be the idea of our civilization which could 
be gained from the religious and funereal monuments of our time, 
which are all we have from which to gain our ideas of the buried 
civilizations. 



536 r THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

previous advance, it is extremely difficult to recognize 
decline, even when it has fully commenced; there is an 
almost irresistible tendency to believe that the forward 
movement which has been advance, and is still going on, 
is still advance. The web of beliefs, customs, laws, 
institutions, and habits of thought, which each commu- 
nity is constantly spinning, and which produces in the 
individual environed by it all the differences of national 
character, is never unraveled. That is to say, in the de- 
cline of civilization, communities do not go down by the 
same paths that they came up. For instance, the decline 
of civilization as manifested in government would not 
take us back from republicanism to constitutional mon- 
archy, and thence to the feudal system; it would take us 
to imperatorship and anarchy. As manifested in reli- 
gion, it would not take us back into the faiths of our fore- 
fathers, into Protestantism or Catholicity, but into new 
forms of superstition, of which possibly Mormonism and 
other even grosser "isms" may give some vague idea. 
As manifested in knowledge, it would not take us toward 
Bacon, but toward the literati of China. 

And how the retrogression of civilization, following a 
period of advance, may be so gradual as to attract no 
attention at the time; nay, how that decline must neces- 
sarily, by the great majority of men, be mistaken for 
advance, is easily seen. For instance, there is an enor- 
mous difference, between Grecian art of the classic period 
and that of the lower empire; yet the change was accom- 
panied, or rather caused, by a change of taste. The 
artists who most quickly followed this change of taste 
were in their day regarded as the superior artists. And 
so of literature. As it became more vapid, puerile, and 
stilted, it would be in obedience to an altered taste, 
which would regard its increasing weakness as increasing 
strength and beauty. The really good writer would not 
find readers; he would be regarded as rude, dry, or dull. 



Jhap.IV. flOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 537 

And so would the drama decline; not because there was 
a lack of good plays, but because the prevailing taste be- 
came more and more that of a less cultured class, who, 
of course, regard that which they most admire as the 
best of its kind. And so, too, of religion; the supersti- 
tions which a superstitious people will add to it will be 
regarded by them as improvements. While, as the de- 
cline goes on, the return to barbarism, where it is not in 
itself regarded as an advance, will seem necessary to meet 
the exigencies of the times. 

For instance, flogging, as a punishment for certain 
offenses, has been recently restored to the penal code of 
England, and has been strongly advocated on this side 
of the Atlantic. I express no opinion as to whether this 
is or is not a better punishment for crime than imprison- 
ment. I only point to the fact as illustrating how an 
increasing amount of crime and-an increasing embarrass- 
ment as to the maintenance of prisoners, both obvious 
tendencies at present, might lead to a fuller return to 
the physical cruelty of barbarous codes. The use of tor- 
ture in judicial investigations, which steadily grew with 
the decline of Eoman civilization, it is thus easy to see, 
might, as manners brutalized and crime increased, be 
demanded as a necessary improvement of the criminal 
law. 

Whether in the present drifts of opinion and taste 
there are as yet any indications of retrogression, it is not 
necessary to inquire; but there are many things about 
which there can be no dispute, which go to show that 
our civilization has reached a critical period, and that 
unless a new start is made in the direction of social equal- 
ity, the nineteenth century may to the future mark its 
climax. These industrial depressions, which cause as 
much waste and suffering as famines or wars, are like 
the twinges and shocks which precede paralysis. Every- 
where is it evident that the tendency to inequality, which 



538 THE LAW OF fl~ 

is the necessary resnlt of material progress where land is 
monopolized, cannot go much further without carrying 
our civilization into that downward path which is so easy 
to enter and so hard to abandon. Everywhere the in- 
creasing intensity of the struggle to live, the increasing 
necessity for straining every nerve to prevent being 
thrown down and trodden under foot in the scramble for 
wealth, is draining the forces which gain and maintain im- 
provements. In every civilized country pauperism, crime, 
insanity, and suicides are increasing. In every civilized 
country the diseases are increasing which come from 
overstrained nerves, from insufficient nourishment, from 
squalid lodgings, from unwholesome and monotonous 
occupations, from premature labor of children, from the 
tasks and crimes which poverty imposes upon women. 
In every highly civilized country the expectation of life, 
which gradually rose for several centuries, and which 
seems to have culminated about the first quarter of this 
century, appears to be now diminishing.* 

It is not an advancing civilization that such figures 
show. It is a civilization which in its undercurrents has 
already begun to recede. When the tide turns in bay or 
river from flood to ebb, it is not all at once; but here it 
still runs on, though there it has begun to recede. When 
the sun passes the meridian, it can be told only by the 
way the short shadows fall; for the heat of the day yet 
increases. But as sure as the turning tide must soon run 
full ebb; as sure as the declining sun must bring dark- 
ness, so sure is it, that though knowledge yet increases 
and invention marches on, and new states are being set- 
tled, and cities still expand, yet civilization has begun to 

* Statistics which show these things are collected in convenient 
form in a volume entitled "Deterioration and Race Education," by 
Samuel Royce, which has been largely distributed by the venerable 
Peter Cooper of New York. Strangely enough, the only remedy 
proposed by Mr. Royce is the establishment of Kindergarten schools. 



Chap. IV. HOW MODERN CIVILIZATION MAY DECLINE. 539 

wane when, in proportion to population, we must build 
more and more prisons, more and more almshouses, more 
and more insane asylums. It is not from top to bottom 
that societies die; it is from bottom to top. 

But there are evidences far more palpable than any 
that can be given by statistics, of tendencies to the ebb 
of civilization. There is a vague but general feeling of 
disappointment; an increased bitterness among the 
working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and 
brooding revolution. If this were accompanied by a 
definite idea of how relief is to be obtained, it would be 
a hopeful sign; but it is not. Though the schoolmaster 
has been abroad some time, the general power of tracing 
effect to cause does not seem a whit improved. The 
reaction toward protectionism, as the reaction toward 
other exploded fallacies of government, shows this.* 
And even the philosophic free-thinker cannot look upon 
that vast change in religious ideas that is now sweeping 
over the civilized world without feeling that this tre- 
mendous fact may have most momentous relations, which 
only the future can develop. For what is going on is 
not a change in the form of religion, but the negation 
and destruction of the ideas from which religion springs. 
Christianity is not simply clearing itself of superstitions, 
but in the popular mind it is dying at the root, as the 
old paganisms were dying when Christianity entered the 
world. And nothing arises to take its place. The fun- 
damental ideas of an intelligent Creator and of a future 
life are in the general mind rapidly weakening. Now, 
whether this may or may not be in itself an advance, the 
importance of the part which religion has played in the 

* In point of constructive statesmanship — the recognition of fun- 
damental principles and the adaptation of means to ends, the Consti- 
tution of the United States, adopted a century ago, is greatly superior 
to the latest State Constitutions, the most recent of which is that of 
California — a piece of utter botchwork. 



540 * THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X. 

world's history shows the importance of the change that 
is now going on. Unless human nature has suddenly 
altered in what the universal history of the race shows 
to be its deepest characteristics, the mightiest actions and 
reactions are thus preparing. Such stages of thought 
have heretofore always marked periods of transition. On 
a smaller scale and to a less depth (for I think any one 
who will notice the drift of our literature, and talk upon 
such subjects with the men he meets, will see that it is 
sub-soil and not surface plowing that materialistic jdeas 
are now doing), such a state of thought preceded the 
French revolution. But the closest parallel to the wreck 
of religious ideas now going on is to be found -in that 
period in which ancient civilization began to pass from 
splendor to decline. What change may come, no mortal 
man can tell, but that some great change must come, 
thoughtful men begin to feel. The civilized world is 
trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either 
it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to 
advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge 
downward, which will carry us back toward barbarism. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 

In the short space to which this latter part of our 
inquiry is necessarily confined, I have been obliged to 
omit much that I would like to say, and to touch briefly 
where an exhaustive consideration would not be out of 
place. 

Nevertheless, this, at least, is evident, that the truth 
to which we were led in the politico-economic branch of 
our inquiry is as clearly apparent in the rise and fall 
of nations and the growth and decay of civilizations, and 
that it accords with those deep-seated recognitions of 
relation and sequence that we denominate moral percep- 
tions. Thus have been given to our conclusions the 
greatest certitude and highest sanction. 

This truth involves both a menace and a promise. It 
shows that the evils arising from the unjust and unequal 
distribution of wealth, which are becoming more and 
more apparent as modern civilization goes on, are not 
incidents of progress, but tendencies which must bring 
progress to a halt; that they will not cure themselves, 
but, on the contrary, must, unless their cause is removed, 
grow greater and greater, until they sweep us back into 
barbarism by the road every previous civilization has 
trod. But it also shows that these evils are not imposed 
by natural laws; that they spring solely from social mal- 
adjustments which ignore natural laws, and that in 
removing their cause we shall be giving an enormous 
impetus to progress. 

The poverty which in the midst of abundance pinchec 



542 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X. 

and imbrutes men, and all the manifold evils which flow 
from it, spring from a denial of justice. In permitting 
the monopolization of the opportunities which nature 
freely offers to all, we have ignored the fundamental 
law of justice — for, so far as we can see, when we 
view things upon a large scale, justice seems to be the 
supreme law of the universe. But by sweeping away 
this injustice and asserting the rights of all men to 
natural opportunities, we shall conform ourselves to the 
law — we shall remove the great cause of unnatural in- 
equality in the distribution of wealth and power; we 
shall abolish poverty; tame the ruthless passions of 
greed; dry up the springs of vice and misery; light in 
dark places the lamp of knowledge; give new vigor to 
invention and a fresh impulse to discovery; substitute 
political strength for political weakness; and make 
tyranny and anarchy impossible. 

The reform I have proposed accords with all that is 
politically, socially, or morally desirable. It has the 
qualities of a true reform, for it will make all other re- 
forms easier. What is it but the carrying out in letter 
and spirit of the truth enunciated in the Declaration of 
Independence — the "self-evident" truth that is the heart 
and soul of the Declaration — "That all men are created 
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain 
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness!" 

These rights are denied when the equal right to land 
— on which and by which men alone can live — is denied. 
Equality of political rights will not compensate for the 
denial of the equal right to the bounty of nature. Polit- 
ical liberty, when the equal right to land is denied, 
becomes, as population increases and invention goes on, 
merely the liberty to compete for employment at starva- 
tion wages. This is the truth that we have ignored 
And so there come beggars in our streets and tramps ol 



Chap. V. THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 543 

our roads; and poverty enslaves men whom we boast are 
political sovereigns; and want breeds ignorance that our 
schools cannot enlighten; and citizens vote as their mas- 
ters dictate; and the demagogue usurps the part of the 
statesman; and gold weighs in the scales of justice; and 
in high places sit those who do not pay to civic virtue 
even the compliment of hypocrisy; and the pillars of 
the republic that we thought so strong already bend 
under an increasing strain. 

We honor Liberty in name and in form. We set up 
her statues and sound her praises. But we have not 
fully trusted her. And with our growth so grow her 
demands. She will have no half service! 

Liberty! it is a word to conjure with, not to vex the 
ear in empty boastings. For Liberty means Justice, and 
Justice is the natural law — the law of health and symme- 
try and strength, of fraternity and co-operation. 

They who look upon Liberty as having accomplished 
her mission when she has abolished hereditary privileges 
and given men the ballot, who think of her as having no 
further relations to the everyday affairs of life, have not 
seen her real grandeur — to them the poets who have 
sung of her must seem rhapsodists, and her martyrs 
fools! As the sun is the lord of life, as well as of light; 
as his beams not merely pierce the clouds, but support 
all growth, supply all motion, and call forth from what 
would otherwise be a cold and inert mass all the infinite 
diversities of being and beauty, so is liberty to mankind. 
It is not for an abstraction that men have toiled and 
died; that in every age the witnesses of Liberty have 
stood forth, and the martyrs of Liberty have suffered. 

We speak of Liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, 
knowledge, invention, national strength and national 
independence as other things* But, of all these, Liberty 
is the source, the mother, the necessary condition. She 
is to virtue what light is to color; to wealth what sun- 



544 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Booh X. 

shine is to grain; to knowledge what eyes are to sight. 
She is the genius of invention, the brawn of national 
strength, the spirit of national independence. Where 
Liberty rises, there virtue grows, wealth increases, knowl- 
edge expands, invention multiplies human powers, and 
in strength and spirit the freer nation rises among her 
neighbors as Saul amid his brethren — taller and fairer. 
Where Liberty sinks, there virtue fades, wealth dimin- 
ishes, knowledge is forgotten, invention ceases, and em- 
pires once mighty in arms and arts become a helpless 
prey to freer barbarians! 

Only in broken gleams and partial light has the sun of 
Liberty yet beamed among men, but all progress hath 
she called forth. 

Liberty came to a race of slaves crouching under Egyp- 
tian whips, and led them forth from the House of Bond- 
age. She hardened them in the desert and made of 
them a race of conquerors. The free spirit of the Mosaic 
law took their thinkers up to heights where they beheld 
the unity of God, and inspired their poets with strains 
that yet phrase the highest exaltations of thought. Lib- 
erty dawned on the Phoenician coast, and ships passed the 
Pillars of Hercules to plow the unknown sea. She shed 
a partial light on Greece, and marble grew to shapes of 
ideal beauty, words became the instruments of subtlest 
thought, and against the scanty militia of free cities the 
countless hosts of the Great King broke like surges 
against a rock. She cast her beams on the four-acre 
farms of Italian husbandmen, and born of her strength 
a power came forth that conquered the world. They 
glinted from shields of German warriors, and Augustus 
wept his legions. Out of the night that followed her 
eclipse, her slanting rays fell again on free cities, and a 
lost learning revived, modern civilization began, a new 
world was unveiled; and as Liberty grew, so grew art, 
wealth, power, knowledge, and refinement. In the his- 



Chap. V THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 545 

tory of every nation we may read the same truth. It was 
the strength born of Magna Charta that won Crecy and 
Agincourt. It was the revival of Liberty from the 
despotism of the Tudors that glorified the Elizabethan 
age. It was the spirit that brought a crowned tyrant to 
the block that planted here the seed of a mighty tree. 
It was the energy of ancient freedom that, the moment 
it had gained unity, made Spain the mightiest power of 
the world, only to fall to the lowest depth of weakness 
when tyranny succeeded liberty. See, in France, all 
intellectual vigor dying under the tyranny of the Seven- 
teenth Century to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke in 
the Eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of French 
peasants in the Great Kevolution, basing the wonderful 
strength that has in our time defied defeat. 

Shall we not trust her? 

In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious 
forces that, producing inequality, destroy Liberty. On 
the horizon the clouds begin to lower. Liberty calls to 
us again. We must follow her further; we must trust 
her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she will 
not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is 
not enough that they should be theoretically equal be- 
fore the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves 
of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand 
on equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. 
Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light! Either this, 
or darkness comes on, and the very forces that progress 
has evolved turn to powers that work destruction. This 
is the universal law. This is the lesson of the centuries. 
Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social struc- 
ture cannot stand. 

Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. 
In allowing one man to own the land on which and from 
which other men must live, we have made them his 
bondsmen in a degree which increases as material prog- 



546 ' THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book 3. 

ress goes on. This is the subtile alchemy that in ways 
they do not realize is extracting from the masses in every 
civilized country the fruits of their weary toil; that is 
instituting a harder and more hopeless slavery in place 
of that which has been destroyed; that is bringing polit- 
ical despotism out of political freedom, and must soon 
transmute democratic institutions into anarchy. 

It is this that turns the blessings of material progress 
into a curse. It is this that crowds human beings into 
noisome cellars and squalid tenement houses; that fills 
prisons and brothels; that goads men with want and 
consumes them with greed; that robs women of the grace 
and beauty of perfect womanhood; that takes from little 
children the joy and innocence of life's morning. 

Civilization so based cannot continue. The eternal 
laws of the universe forbid it. Euins of dead empires 
testify, and the witness that is in every soul answers, 
that it cannot be. It is something grander than Benevo- 
lence, something more august than Charity — it is Justice 
herself that demands of us to right this wrong. Justice 
that will not be denied; that cannot be put off — Justice 
that with the scales carries the sword. Shall we ward 
the stroke with liturgies and prayers? Shall we avert 
the decrees of immutable law by raising churches when 
hungry infants moan and weary mothers weep? 

Though it may take the language of prayer, it is blas- 
phemy that attributes to the inscrutable decrees of Provi- 
dence the suffering and brutishness that come of poverty; 
that turns with folded hands to the All-Father and lays 
on Him the responsibility for the want and crime of our 
great cities. We degrade the Everlasting. We slander 
the Just One. A merciful man would have better ordered 
the world; a just man would crush with his foot such an 
ulcerous anthill! It is not the Almighty, but we who 
are responsible for the vice and misery that fester amid 
our civilization. The Creator showers upon us his gifts 



Chap. V. THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 547 

— more than enough for all. But like swine scrambling 
for food, we tread them in the mire — tread them in the 
mire, while we tear and rend each other! 

In the very centers of our civilization to-day are want 
and suffering enough to make sick at heart whoever does 
not close his eyes and steel his nerves. Dare we turn to 
the Creator and ask Him to relieve it? Supposing the 
prayer were heard, and at the behest with which the uni- 
verse sprang into being there should glow in the sun a 
greater power; new virtue fill the air; fresh vigor the 
soil; that for every blade of grass that now grows two 
should spring up, and the seed that now increases fifty- 
fold should increase a hundred-fold! Would poverty be 
abated or want relieved? Manifestly no! Whatever 
benefit would accrue would be but temporary. The new 
powers streaming through the material universe could be 
utilized only through land. And land, being private 
property, the classes that now monopolize the bounty of 
the Creator would monopolize all the new bounty. Land 
owners would alone be benefited. Eents would increase, 
but wages would still tend to the starvation point! 

This is not merely a deduction of political economy; it 
is a fact of experience. We know it because we have 
seen it. Within our own times, under our very eyes, 
that Power which is above all, and in all, and through 
all; that Power of which the whole universe is but the mani- 
festation; that Power which maketh all things, and with- 
out which is not anything made that is made, has increased 
the bounty which men may enjoy, as truly as though the 
fertility of nature had been increased. Into the mind of 
one came the thought that harnessed steam for the serv- 
ice of mankind. To the inner ear of another was whis- 
pered the secret that compels the lightning to bear a 
message round the globe. In every direction have the 
laws of matter been revealed; in every department of 
industry have arisen arms of iron and fingers of steel, 



548 ' IE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS. Book X 

whose effect u^on the production of wealth has been pre- 
cisely the same as an increase in the fertility of nature. 
What has been the result? Simply that land owners get 
all the gain. The wonderful discoveries and inventions, 
of our century have neither increased wages nor lightened 
toil. The effect has simply been to make the few richer; 
the many more helpless! 

Can it be that the gifts of the Creator may be thus 
misappropriated with impunity? Is it a light thing that 
labor should be robbed of its earnings while greed rolls 
in wealth — that the many should want while the few are 
surfeited? Turn to history, and on every page may be 
read the lesson that such wrong never goes unpunished; 
that the Nemesis that follows injustice never falters 
nor sleeps! Look around to-day. Can this state of 
things continue? May we even say, " After us the del- 
uge!" Nay; the pillars of the state are trembling even 
now, and the very foundations of society begin to quiver 
with pent-up forces that glow underneath. The struggle 
that must either revivify, or convulse in ruin, is near at 
hand, if it be not already begun. 

The fiat has gone forth! With steam and electricity, 
and the new powers born of progress, forces have entered 
the world that will either compel us to a higher plane or 
overwhelm us, as nation after nation, as civilization after 
civilization, have been overwhelmed before. It is the 
delusion which precedes destruction that sees in the 
popular unrest with which the civilized world is fever- 
ishly pulsing only the passing effect of ephemeral causes. 
Between democratic ideas and the aristocratic adjust- 
ments of society there is an irreconcilable conflict. Here 
in the United States, as there in Europe, it may be seen 
arising. We cannot go on permitting men to vote and 
forcing them to tramp. We cannot go on educating boys 
and girls in our public schools and then refusing them 
the right to earn an honest living. We cannot go on 



Chap. V. THE CENTRAL TRUTH. 549 

prating of the inalienable rights of man ai d then deny- 
ing the inalienable right to the bounty of the Creator., 
Even now, in old bottles the new wine begins to ferment, 
and elemental forces gather for the strife! 

But if, while there is yet time, we turn to Justice and 
obey her, if we trust Liberty and follow her, the dangers 
that now threaten must disappear, the forces that now 
menace will turn to agencies of elevation. Think of the 
powers now wasted; of the infinite fields of knowledge 
yet to be explored; of the possibilities of which the won- 
drous inventions of this century give us but a hint. 
With want destroyed: with greed changed to noble pas- 
sions; with the fraternity that is born of equality taking 
the place of the jealousy and fear that now array men 
against each other; with mental power loosed by con- 
ditions that give to the humblest comfort and leisure; 
and who shall measure the heights to which our civiliza- 
tion may soar? Words fail the thought! It is the 
Golden Age of which poets have sung and high-raised 
seers have told in metaphor! It is the glorious vision 
which has always haunted man with gleams of fitful 
splendor. It is what he saw whose eyes at Patmos were 
closed in a trance. It is the culmination of Christianity 
— the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and 
its^ gates of pearl! It is the reign of the Prince of Peace! 



CONCLUSION. 



THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 



The days of the nations bear no trace 

Of all the sunshine so far foretold; 
The cannon speaks in the teacher's place — 

The age is weary with work and gold, 
And high hopes wither, and memories wane; 

On hearths and altars the fires are dead; 
But that brave faith hath not lived in vain — 

And this is all that our watcher said. 

— Frances Brown 



CONCLUSION, 

THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 

My task is done. 

Yet the thought still mounts. The problems we have 
been considering lead into a problem higher and deeper 
still. Behind the problems of social life lies the problem 
of individual life. I have found it impossible to think of 
the one without thinking of the other, and so, I imagine, 
will it be with those who, reading this book, go with me 
m thought. For, as says Guizot, "when the history of 
civilization is completed, when there is nothing more to 
say as to our present existence, man inevitably asks him- 
self whether all is exhausted, whether he has reached the 
end of all things?" 

This problem I cannot now discuss. I speak of it only 
because the thought which, while writing this book, has 
come with inexpressible cheer to me, may also be of cheer 
to some who read it; for, whatever be its fate, it will be 
read by some who in their heart of hearts have taken 
the cross of a new crusade. This thought will come to 
them without my suggestion; but we are surer that we 
see a star when we know that others also see it. 

The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find 
easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been 
accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have 
been obscured. But it will find friends — those who will 
toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This is 
the power of Truth. 

Will it at length prevail? Ultimately, yes. But in 



554 r CONCLUSION. 

our own times, or in times of which any memory of us 
remains, who shall say? 

For the man who, seeing the want and misery, the 
ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social insti- 
tutions, sets himself, in so far as he has strength, to 
right them, there is disappointment and bitterness. So 
it has been of old time. So is it even now. But the 
bitterest thought — and it sometimes comes to the best 
and bravest — is that of the hopelessness of the effort, the 
futility of the sacrifice. To how few of those who sow 
the seed is it given to see it grow, or even with certainty 
to know that it will grow. 

Let us not disguise it. Over and over again has the 
standard of Truth and Justice been raised in this world. 
Over and over again has it been trampled down — often- 
times in blood. If they are weak forces that are opposed 
to Truth, how should Error so long prevail? If Justice 
has but to raise her head to have Injustice flee before 
her, how should the wail of the oppressed so long go up? 

But for those who see Truth and would follow her; for 
those who recognize Justice and would stand for her, 
success is not the only thing. Success! Why, False- 
hood has often that to give; and Injustice often has that 
to give. Must not Truth and Justice have something to 
give that is their own by proper right — theirs in essence, 
and not by accident? 

That they have, and that here and now, every one who 
has felt their exaltation knows. But sometimes the 
clouds sweep down. It is sad, sad reading, the lives of 
the men who would have done something for their fel- 
lows. To Socrates they gave the hemlock; Gracchus 
they killed with sticks and stones; and One, greatest and 
purest of all, they crucified. These seem but types. 
To-day Eussian prisons are full, and in long processions, 
men and women, who, but for high-minded patriotism, 
might have lived in ease and luxury, move in chains 



THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 555 

toward the death-in-life of Siberia. And in penury and 
want, in neglect and contempt, destitute even of the 
sympathy that would have been so sweet, how many in 
every country have closed their eyes? This we see. 

But do tve see it all? 

In writing I have picked up a newspaper. In it is a 
short account, evidently translated from a semi-official 
report, of the execution of three Nihilists at Kieff — the 
Prussian subject Brandtner, the unknown man calling 
himself Antonoff, and the nobleman Ossinsky. At the 
foot of the gallows they were permitted to kiss one an- 
other. "Then the hangman cut the rope, the surgeons 
pronounced the victims dead, the bodies were buried at 
the foot of the scaffold, and the Nihilists were given up 
to eternal oblivion." Thus says the account. I do not 
believe it. No; not to oblivion! 

I have in this inquiry followed the course of my own 
thought. When, in mind, I set out on it 1 had no theory 
to support, no conclusions to prove. Only, when I first 
realized the squalid misery of a great city, it appalled 
and tormented me, and would not let me rest, for think- 
ing of what caused it and how it could be cured. 

But out of this inquiry has come to me something I 
did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives. 

The yearning for a further life is natural and deep. It 
grows with intellectual growth, and perhaps none really 
feel it more than those who have begun to see how great 
is the universe and how infinite are the vistas which 
every advance in knowledge opens before us — vistas 
which would require nothing short of eternity to explore. 
But in the mental atmosphere of our times, to the great 
majority of men on whom mere creeds have lost their 
hold, it seems impossible to look on this yearning save 
as a vain and childish hope, arising from man's egotism, 
and for which there is not the slightest ground or war- 



556 ' CONCLUSION. 

rant, but which, on the contrary, seems inconsistent with 
positive knowledge. 

Now, when we come to analyze and trace up the ideas 
that thus destroy the hope of a future life, we shall find 
them, I think, to have their source, not in any revelations 
of physical science, but in certain teachings of political 
and social science which have deeply permeated thought 
in all directions. They have their root in the doctrines, 
that there is a tendency to the production of more human 
beings than can be provided for; that vice and misery 
are the result of natural laws, and the means by which 
advance goes on; and that human progress is by a slow 
race development. These doctrines, which have been 
generally accepted as approved truth, do what, except as 
scientific interpretations have been colored by them, the 
extensions of physical science do not do — they reduce 
the individual to insignificance; they destroy the idea 
that there can be in the ordering of the universe any 
regard for his existence, or any recognition of what we 
call moral qualities. 

It is difficult to reconcile the idea of human immortal- 
ity with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly 
bringing them into being where there is no room for 
them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelli- 
gent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the 
wretchedness and degradation which are the lot of such 
a large proportion of human kind result from his enact- 
ments; while the idea that man mentally and physically 
is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by hered- 
ity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life, 
not the individual life, which is the object of human 
existence. Thus has vanished with many of us, and is 
still vanishing with more of us, that belief which in the 
battles and ills of life affords the strongest support and 
deepest consolation. 

Now, in the inquiry through which we have passed, 



THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 557 

we have met these doctrines and seen their fallacy. We 
have seen that population does not tend to outrun sub- 
sistence; we have seen that the waste of human powers 
and the prodigality of human suffering do not spring 
from natural laws, but from the ignorance and selfishness 
of men in refusing to conform to natural laws. We have 
seen that human progress is not by altering the nature of 
men; but that, on the contrary, the nature of men seems, 
generally speaking, always the same. 

Thus the nightmare which is banishing from the 
modern world the belief in a future life is destroyed. 
Not that all difficulties are removed — for turn which way 
we may, we come to what we cannot comprehend; but 
that difficulties are removed which seem conclusive and 
insuperable. And, thus, hope springs up. 

But this is not all. 

Political Economy has been called the dismal science, 
and as currently taught, is hopeless and despairing. But 
this, as we have seen, is solely because she has been 
degraded and shackled; her truths dislocated; her har- 
monies ignored; the word she would utter gagged in her 
mouth, and her protest against wrong turned into an 
indorsement of injustice. Freed, as I have tried to free 
her — in her own proper symmetry, Political Economy is 
radiant with hope. 

For properly understood, the laws which govern the 
production and distribution of wealth show that the want 
and injustice of the present social state are not necessary; 
but that, on the contrary, a social state is possible in 
which poverty would be unknown, and all the better 
qualities and higher powers of human nature would have 
opportunity for full development. 

And, further than this, when we see that social de- 
velopment is governed neither by a Special Providence 
nor hv a merciless fate, but by law, at once unchangeable 



558 r conclusion. 

and beneficent; when we see that human will is the great 
factor, and that taking men in the aggregate, their con- 
dition is as they make it; when we see that economic 
law and moral law are essentially one, and that the truth 
which the intellect grasps after toilsome effort is but 
that which the moral sense reaches by a quick intuition, 
a flood of light breaks in upon the problem of individual 
life. These countless millions like ourselves, who on 
this earth of ours have passed and still are passing, with 
their joys and sorrows, their toil and their striving, their 
aspirations and their fears, their strong perceptions of 
things deeper than sense, their common feelings which 
form the basis even of the most divergent creeds — their 
little lives do not seem so much like meaningless waste. 

The great fact which Science in all her branches shows 
is the universality of law. Wherever he can trace it, 
whether in the fall of an apple or in the revolution of 
binary suns, the astronomer sees the working of the 
same law, which operates in the minutest divisions in 
which we may distinguish space, as it does in the im- 
measurable distances with which his science deals. Out 
of that which lies beyond his telescope comes a moving 
body and again it disappears. So far as he can trace its 
course the law is ignored. Does he say that this is an 
exception? On the contrary, he says that this is merely 
a part of its orbit that he has seen; that beyond the 
reach of his telescope the law holds good. He makes his 
calculations, and after centuries they are proved. 

Now, if we trace out the laws which govern human 
life in society, we find that in the largest as in the small- 
est community, they are the same. We find that what 
seem at first sight like divergences and exceptions are 
but manifestations of the same principles. And we find 
that everywhere we can trace it, the social law runs into 
and conforms with the moral law; that in the life of a 
community, justice infallibly brings its reward and in- 



THE PROBLEM 01 INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 559 

justice its punishment. But this we cannot see in in- 
dividual life. If we look merely at individual life we 
cannot see that the laws of the universe have the slight- 
est relation to good or bad, to right or wrong, to just or 
unjust.* Shall we then say that the law which is mani- 
fest in social life is not true of individual life? It is not 
scientific to say so. We would not say so in reference to 
anything else. Shall we not rather say this simply proves 
that we do not see the whole of individual life? 

The laws which Political Economy discovers, like the 
facts and relations of physical nature, harmonize with 
what seems to be the law of mental development — not a 
necessary and involuntary progress, but a progress in. 
which the human will is an initiatory force. But in life, 
as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go 
but a little way. The mind hardly begins to awake ere 
the bodily powers decline — it but becomes dimly con- 
scious of the vast fields before it, but begins to learn and 
use its strength, to recognize relations and extend its 
sympathies, when, with the death of the body, it passes 
away. Unless there is something more, there seems here 
a break, a failure. Whether it be a Humboldt or a 
Herschel, a Moses who looks from Pisgah, a Joshua who 
leads the host, or one of those sweet and patient souls 
who in narrow circles live radiant lives, there seems, if 

* Let us not delude our children. If for no other reason than for 
that which Plato gives, that when they come to discard that which 
we told them as pious fable they will also discard that which we 
told them as truth. The virtues which relate to self do generally 
bring their reward. Either a merchant or a thief will be more suc- 
cessful if he be sober, prudent, and faithful to his promises; but as 
to the virtues which do not relate to self — 

"It seems a story from the world of spirits, 
When any one obtains that which he merits, 
Or any merits that which he obtains." 



560 conclusion-. 

mind and character here developed can go no further, a 
purposelessness inconsistent with what we can see of the 
linked sequence of the universe. 

By a fundamental law of our minds — the law, in fact, 
upon which Political Economy relies in all her deduc- 
tions — we cannot conceive of a means without an end; a 
contrivance without an object. Now, to all nature, so 
far as we come in contact with it in this world, the sup- 
port and employment of the intelligence that is in man 
furnishes such an end and object. But unless man him- 
self may rise to or bring forth something higher, his 
existence is unintelligible. So strong is this metaphys- 
ical necessity that those who deny to the individual any- 
thing more than this life are compelled to transfer the 
idea of perfectibility to the race. But as we have seen, 
and the argument could have been made much more 
complete, there is nothing whatever to show any essential 
race improvement. Human progress is not the improve- 
ment of human nature. The advances in which civiliza- 
tion consists are not secured in the constitution of man, 
but in the constitution of society. They are thus not 
fixed and permanent, but may at any time be lost — nay, 
are constantly tending to be lost. And further than 
this, if human life does not continue beyond what we see 
of it here, then we are confronted, with regard to the 
race, with the same difficulty as with the individual! 
For it is as certain that the race must die as it is that the 
individual must die. We know that there have been 
geologic conditions under which human life was impossi- 
ble on this earth. We know that they must return 
again. Even now, as the earth circles on her appointed 
orbit, the northern ice cap slowly thickens, and the time 
gradually approaches, when its glaciers will flow again, 
and austral seas, sweeping northward, bury the seats of 
present civilization under ocean wastes, as it may be they 
now bury what was once as high a civilization as our own, 



THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 561 

And beyond these periods, science discerns a dead earth, 
an exhausted sun — a time when, clashing together, the 
solar system shall resolve itself into a gaseous form, 
again to begin immeasurable mutations. 

What then is the meaning of life — of life absolutely 
and inevitably bounded by death? To me it seems in- 
telligible only as the avenue and vestibule to another 
life. And its facts seem explainable only upon a theory 
which cannot be expressed but in myth and symbol, and 
which, everywhere and at all times, the myths and sym- 
bols in which men have tried to portray their deepest 
perceptions do in some form express. 

The scriptures of the men who have been and gone — 
the Bibles, the Zend Avestas, the Vedas, the Dhamma- 
padas, and the Korans; the esoteric doctrines of old phi- 
losophies, the inner meaning of grotesque religions, the 
dogmatic constitutions of Ecumenical Councils, the preach- 
ings of Foxes, and Wesleys, and Savonarolas, the tradi- 
tions of red Indians, and beliefs of black savages, have a 
heart and core in which they agree — a something which 
seems like the variously distorted apprehensions of a 
primary truth. And out of the chain of thought we have 
been following there seems vaguely to rise a glimpse of 
what they vaguely saw — a shadowy gleam of ultimate 
relations, the endeavor to express which inevitably falls 
into type and allegory. A garden in which are set the 
trees of good and evil. A vineyard in which there is 
the Master's work to do. A passage — from life behind to 
life beyond. A trial and a struggle, of which we cannot 
see the end. 

Look around to-day. 

Lo! here, now, in our civilized society, the old allego- 
ries yet have a meaning, the old myths are still true. 
Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death yet often leads 
the path of duty, through the streets of Vanity Fair 



562 CONCLUSION". 

walk Christian and Faithful, and on Greatheart's armor 
ring the clanging blows. Ormuzd still fights with Ahri- 
man — the Prince of Light with the Powers of Darkness 
He who will hear, to him the clarions of the battle call. 

How they call, and call, and call, till the heart swells 
that hears them! Strong soul and high endeavor, the 
world needs them now. Beauty still lies imprisoned, and 
iron wheels go over the good and true and beautiful that 
might spring from human lives. 

And they who fight with Ormuzd, though they may 
not know each other — somewhere, sometime, will the 
muster roll be called. 

Though Truth and Right seem often overborne, we 
may not see it all. How can we see it all? All that is 
passing, even here, we cannot tell. The vibrations of 
matter which give the sensations of light and color become 
to us indistinguishable when they pass a certain point. It 
is only within a like range that we have cognizance of 
sounds. Even animals have senses which we have not. 
And, here? Compared with the solar system our earth 
is but an indistinguishable speck; and the solar system 
itself shrivels into nothingness when gauged with the 
star depths. Shall we say that what passes from our 
sight passes into oblivion? No; not into oblivion. Far v 
far beyond our ken the eternal laws must hold their sway. 

The hope that rises is the heart of all religions! The 
poets have sung it, the seers have told it, and in its deep- 
est pulses the heart of man throbs responsive to its truth. 
This, that Plutarch said, is what in all times and in all 
tongues has been said by the pure hearted and strong 
sighted, who, standing as it were, on the mountain tops 
of thought and looking over the shadowy ocean, have 
beheld the loom of land: 

"Men's souls, encompassed here with bodies and pas* 



THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 563 

sions, have no communication with God, except what they 
can reach to in conception only, by means of philosophy, as 
by a hind of an obscure dream. But when they are loosed 
from the body, and removed into the unseen, invisible, 
impassable, and pure region, this God is then their leader 
and king; they there, as it tvere, hanging on him wholly, 
and beholding without weariness and passionately affecting 
that beauty which cannot be expressed or uttered by men" 



INDEX 



Bagehot, Walter, arrest of civilization, 
480-481 ; why barbarians waste away, 
497-198. 

Bastiat, cause of interest, 176-186. 

Bisset, Andrew, knight's service, 
381rc. 

Buckle, assumes current doctrine of 
wages, 18; on Malthus, 92-93, 100; 
interest and profits, 158; relation be- 
tween rent, wages and interest, 170. 

Cairnes, J. E., high wages and interest 
in new countries, 20-22. 

California, economic principles exem- 
plified in, 19-20, (51-63, 78, 144-146, 174, 
255-256, 27.1-275, 290-291, 344, 383-385, 
392, 398, 434-435. 

Capital, current doctrine of its relation 
to wages, 17-13; idle in industrial 
depressions, 21; theory that wages 
are drawn from, 20-23; deductions 
from this theoiy, 24-25; varying 
definitions of, 32-34; difficulties be- 
setting use of term, 36-37; ex- 
clusions of term, 37-38; distinguished 
from wealth, 41-47, 71-72; used in two 
senses, 56-57; definitions of Smith, 
Ricardo, McCulloch, and Mill com- 
pared, 41-45; wages not drawn from, 
23-29, 49-69; does not limit industry, 
26-29, 57-58, 80-86; does not main- 
tain laborers, 70-78; modes in which 
it aids labor, 79, 186-188, 195-196; 
real functions of 79-87; may limit 
form and productiveness of industry, 
80-82; apparent want of generally 
due to some other want, 82-85; 
limited by requirements of produc- 
tion, 85-86; poverty not due to 
scarcity of, 85-86 ; not necessary to 
production, 163-164; a form of labor, 
164, 198, 203; its essence, 179; spurious, 
189-194; not fixed in quantity, 195; if 
the only active factor in produc- 
tion, 201-202; its profits as affected 
by wages, 308-309; wastes when not 
used, 311; invested upon possessory 
titles, 385. 

Carey, Henry C, on capital, 34; rent, 
225. 

China, cause of poverty and , famine, 
121-122; civilization, 480-481. 

Civilization, what, 475-476; prevailing 
belief as to progress of, 476-479; 
arrest of, 479-486; differences in, 
487-502; its law, 503-523; retro- 
gression, 482-486, 536-537; to endure 
mast be based on justice, 543-546; 
character of European, 518, 526. 

Civilization, modern, its riddle, 10; 
has not improved condition of the 
lowest class, 281-284; development 
of, 372-382; superiority, 519-520; may 
decline, 524-528; indications of ret- 
rogression, 537-540; its possibilities, 
452-469, 549. 

Communities, industrial, extent of, 
197. 



Confucius, descendants of, 111-112. 

Consumption, supported by contena- 
poraneous production, 72-75; de- 
mand for determines production, 
75-76; only relative term, 133; in- 
crease of shows increasing produc- 
tion, 149. 

Co-operation, not a remedy for pov- 
erty, 314-317; but will follow from 
the extirpation of poverty, 452-469. 

Debts, public, not capital, 189-190; 
origin and abolition, 381-382, 453. 

Demand, not fixed, 243, 245-247. (See 
Supply and Demand.) 

Deutsch, Emanuel, human nature, 495. 

Development, concentration the order 
of. 325. 

Development Philosophy, relations to 
Malthusianism, 100-101 ; insufficiency 
of, 473-486. 

Discount, high rates of, not interest, 
21n. 

Distribution, terms of exclusive, 37* 
38, 162; laws of, 153-222; their neces- 
sary relation, 160-164; as currently 
taught, 160-161 ; contrasted with true 
laws, 218; equality of, 450-451. 

Education no remedy for poverty, 305- 
306. 

Exchange, functions of, 27-29, 76-77; 
a part of production, 47; brings in- 
crease, 182-183, 186-187; extends 
with progress of civilization, 197; 
promotes civilization, 508-509. 

Exchanges, credit in, 276-277; effect of 
wages on international, 309-310. 

Fawcett, Prof., Indian expenditures, 
120?i; value of land in England, 287. 

Fawcett, Mrs., laborers maintained 
by capital, 70; land tax, 421. 

Feudal system, recognition of common 
rights to land, 372-375, 381, infeuda- 
tion, 396-397. 

Fortunes, great, 193-194, 386-387, 451. 

Franklin, Benjamin, his economy, 
303. 

Government, improvements in increase 
production, 227, 252; will not relieve 
poverty, 298-301; simplification and 
change of character, 452-469; tend- 
ency to republicanism, 526-527; 
transition to despotism, 301, 527-528. 

Guizot, Europe after fall of Roman 
Empire, 372-373; the question that 
arises from a review of civilization, 
553. 

Hyndman, H. M., Indian famine, 119- 
120. 

Improvements in the arts, effect upon 
distribution, 242-252; in habits of in- 
dustry and thrift, will not relieve 
poverty, 301-308; upon land, their 
value separable from land values, 
341-342, 422-423. 

India, cause of poverty and famine, 
114-121; civilization, 480, 481, 497. 

Industrial depressions, extent and sig- 



560 



IKDEX. 



nificance, 5-6, 537-538; conflicting 
opinions as to cause, 10-11; their 
cause and course, 261-279; connection 
with railroad building, 272-274; pass- 
ing away, 279. 

Industry, not limited by capital, 26, 56- 
57; may be limited in form and pro- 
ductiveness by capital, 80-86. 

Interest, confusion of term with profits, 
156-163; proper signification, 161-162; 
variations m, 174; cause of, 174- 
188; justice of, 187; profits mistaken 
for, 189-194; law of, 195-203; normal 
point of, 198-199; formulation of law, 
202. 

Interest and wages,evident connection, 
19-21; relation, 171-172,199-203,218; 
why higher in new countries, 221. 

Inventions, labor-saving, failure to re- 
lieve poverty, 3-5; advantage of goes 
primarily to labor, 179, 195-196; ex- 
cept when not diffused, 251 ; effect of, 
242-252; brought forth by freedom, 
521-523. 

Ireland, cause of poverty and famine, 
123-128; effect of introduction of 
potato, 303-304. 

Labor, purpose of, 27-29, 244-245, 396; 
meaning of term, 37-38; produces 
wages, 27-29, 49-69; precedes wages, 
55-58; employs capital, 163, 195; elimi- 
nated from production, 201-202; pro- 
ductiveness varies with natural 
powers, 205; no fixed barriers between 
occupations, 210-211 ; value of reduced 
by value of land, 221-222; supply and 
demand, 268-269; land necessary to, 
270, 292-294; cause of want of em- 

Eloyment, 271-272; family, 304; com- 
ination, 308-314; only rightful basis 
of property, 332-335; efficiency in- 
creases with wages, 441-442; not in 
itself repugnant, 465. 

Labor and Capital, different forms of 
same thing, 163-164,198, 203; whence 
idea of their conflict arises, 189, 194; 
harmony of interests, 198-203. 

Laborers, not maintained by capital, 
70-78; where land is monopolized, 
have no interest in increase of pro- 
ductive power, 281 ; made more de- 
pendent by civilization, 281-284; or- 
ganizations of, 308-314; condition not 
improved by division of land, 321- 
325; their enslavement the ultimate 
result of private property in land, 
345-355. 

Land, meaning of term, 37; value of is 
not wealth, 39, 165-166; diminishing 
productiveness cited in support Mal- 
thusian theory, 97; how far true, 
133-134, 228-241; maintenance of 
prices. 274-275; estimated value of in 
England, 287; effects of monopoliza- 
tion in England, 288-289; relation of 
man to, 292-294 ; division of will not re- 
lieve poverty, 319-325; tendency to 
concentration in ownership, 319-321 ; 
necessity for abolishing private 
Ownership, 326-327; injustice of 



private property in, 331-392; absurd- 
ity of legal titles to, 340, 342-344; 
aristocracy and serfdom spring from 
ownership of, 294, 34S-355, 514-515; 
purchase by government, 357-358; 
development of private ownership, 
3G6-382; commons, 375-376; tenures 
in the United States, 383-392; private 
ownership inconsistent with best use, 
395-400; how may be made common 
property, 401 427; effects of this, 
452-469; increase of productiveness 
from better distribution of popula- 
tion, 449n. 
Land owners, power of, 167, 292-294, 
345-355; ease of their combination, 
312-313; their claims to compensa- 
tion, 356-365; will not be injured by 
confiscation of rent, 445-469. 
Latimer, Hugh, increase of rent in Six- 
teenth Century, 288-289. 
Laveleye, M. de, on small land hold- 
ings, 324-325; primitive land tenures, 
369; Teutonic equality, 372. 
Lawyers, confusions in their terminol- 
ogy, 335-336; their inculcation of 
the sacredness of property, 366; in- 
fluence on land tenures, 370/1. 
Life, quantity of human, 109-110; 
limits to, 129-134; reproductive power 
gives increase to capital, 181; balance 
of, 196-197; meaning of, 561. 
Macaulay, English rule in India, 116; 

future of United States, 534. 
Machinery. (See Inventions.) 
McCulloch, on wages fund, 22-23^; 
definition of capital, 33-34; compared, 
42-44; principle of increase, 101; 
Irish poverty and distress, 125-126; 
rent, 232; tax on rent, 420, 422-425. 
Malthus, purpose of Essay on Popula- 
tion, 98; its absurdities, 104-105, 137; 
his other works treated with con- 
tempt, 105-1 06n; fall of wages in 
Sixteenth Century, 288; cause of his 
popularity, 98-100, 336-337™. 
Malthusian Theory, stated, examined 
and disproved, 91-150; as stated by 
Malthus, 93-94; as stated by Mill, 
94-95, 140-141 ; in its strongest form, 
95; its triumph and the causes, 
95-96; harmonizes with ideas of 
working classes, 98; defends in- 
equality and discourages reform, 
98-99, 140-141, 336-337n ; its extension 
in development philosophy, 101; 
now generally accepted, 101-102; 
its illegitimate inferences, 103-139; 
facts which disprove it, 140-150; 
its support from doctrine of rent, 
97, 132-133, 228-229; effects pred- 
icated of increase of population 
result from improvements in the 
arts, 242-252; the ultimate defense 
of property in land, 336-337n. 
Man more than an animal, 129-131, 
134-136, 307, 464, 473-475, 492-493; 
his power to avail himself of the 
reproductive forces of nature, 131- 
132; primary right and power, 33S 



IKDEX. 



56? 



833; desire for approbation, 456-458; 
selfishness not the master motive, 
460-461; his infinite desires, 134-136, 
243, 245-247, 464-465, 503; how im- 

{>roves, 475 ; idea of national or race 
ife, 485-486; cause of differences 
and progress, 487-502: hereditary- 
transmission, 492-502; social in his 
nature, 506. 

Mill, John Stuart, definition of capital, 
34, 71-72; industry limited by cap ;tal, 
56-57n, 70-71; Malthusian doctrine, 
94-95, 111; effect of unrestricted in- 
crease of population, 140-141; con- 
fusion as to profits and interest, 158; 
law of rent, 168; wages, 213; govern- 
ment resumption of increase of land 
values, 358-360; influence of Malthu- 
sianism, 360-361; tax on rent, 420- 
421. 

Money, when capital, 45 ; in hands of 
consumer. 46n; confounded with 
wealth, 60-61; lack of commodities 
spoken of as lack of, 266. 

Monopolies, profits of, 191-194; cause 
of certain, 408-409. 

More, Sir Thomas, ejectments of cot- 
tagers, 289. 

Nature, its reproductive power, 180- 
182; utilization of its variations, 
182-183, 185-187; equation between 
reproduction and destruction, 196- 
197; impartiality of, 333-334. 

Nicholson, N. A., on capital, 35. 

Nightingale, Florence, causes of 
famine in India, 118-119, 119?i, 120n. 

Perry, Arthur Latham, on capital, 34; 
rent, 225. 

Political Economy, its failure, its na- 
ture and its methods, 10-13; 
doctrines based upon the theory 
that wages are drawn from capital 
24-25; importance of definitions, 
30-36; its terms abstract terms, 47; 
confusion of standard treatises, 
56-57, 158-161, 218; the erroneous 
standpoint which its investigators 
have adopted, 162-163; its funda- 
mental principle, 12, 204, 217, 560; 
writers on, stumbling over law of 
wages, 215-216; compared with 
astronomy, 219-220; deals with gen- 
eral tendencies, 278-279; admissions 
in standard works as to property 
in land, 356-358; principles not 
pushed to logical conclusions, 421; 
the Physiocrats, 421-422; unison 
with moral truth, 230, 484; its hope- 
fulness, 557; effect on religious 
ideas, 555-556. 

Population and Subsistence, 91-150. 
(See Malthusian Theory.) 

Population, inferences as to in- 
crease, 103-104; of world, no evi- 
dence of increase in, 107-110; pres- 
ent, 113n; increase of descendants 
not increase of, 112; only limited by 
space, 133-134; real law of increase, 
137-139; effect of increase upon 



production and distribution, 228- 
241; increase of increases wealth, 
140-150; puts land to intenser uses. 
320; increase in United States, 390. 

Poverty, its connection with material 
progress, 6-10; failure to explain 
this, 10-11; where deepest, 222; why 
it accompanies progress, 280-294; 
remedy for, 326-328; springs from 
injustice, 33&-S39, 541-542; its effects, 
354, 456-464. 

Price, not measured by the necessity 
of the buyer, 185; equation of 
equalizes reward of labor, 204. 

Production, same principles obvious in 
complex as in simple forms, 26-29; 
factors of, 37, 162, 203, 270, 292-294; 
includes exchange, 47; the im 
mediate result of labor, 64-67; 
directed by demand for consumption, 
75; functions of capital in, 79-87, 162- 
164; simple modes of sometimes 
most efficient, 84-85; only relative 
term, 133; increased shown by in- 
creased consumption, 149; meaning 
of the term, 155; utilizes reproduc- 
tive forces, 179-182; time an element 
in, 180-185; the modes of, 186; re- 
course to lower points does not in- 
volve diminution of, 229-232; tend- 
ency to large scale, 320-321, 325. 
531-532; susceptible of enormous in- 
crease, 431-434, 466, 547. 

Profits, meaning of the term and con- 
fusions in its use, 158-162. 189-194. 

Progress, human, current theory of 
considered, 473-486; in what it con- 
sists, 487-502; its law, 503-523, 541- 
549; retrogression, 524-540. 

Progress, material, connection with 
poverty, 7-11, 222; in what it consists, 
227; effects upon distribution of 
wealth, 228-241 : effect of expectation 
raised by, 253-258; how it results in 
industrial depressions, 261-279; why 
it produces poverty. 280-294. 

Property, basis of, 331-334, 340-342; 
erroneous categories of, 335; deriva- 
tion of distinction between real and 
personal, 377; private in land not 
necessary to use of land, 395-400; 
idea of transferred to land, 514-515. 

Protection, its fallacies have their 
root in belief as to wages, 19; effect 
on agriculturists, 447-449; abolition 
by England, effect of, 252; how pro- 
tective taxes fall, 447-448. 

Quesnay, his doctrine, 422-423, 431. 

Rent, bearing upon Malthusian theory, 
96-98, 132-134, 228-241, 242-252; mean- 
ing of the term, 165; arises from 
monopoly, 166; law of, 168-170; its 
corollaries, 171, 217-218; effect of 
their recognition, 171-172; as related 
to interest, 201-203; as related to 
wages, 204-216; advance of explains 
why wages and interest do not ad- 
vance, 221-222; increased by increase 
of population, 228-241: increased by 



568 



INDEX. 



improvements, 243-252; by specula- 
tion, 253-258; speculative advance 
in the cause of industrial depres- 
sions, 261-279; advance in explains 
the persistence of poverty, 280-294; 
increase of not prevented by tenant 
right, 322; or by division of land, 
324-325; serf, generally fixed, 353; 
confiscation of future increase, 357- 
359; a continuous robbery, 362-363; 
feudal rents, 372-375; their abolition, 
378-381; their present value, 381-382; 
rent now taken by the State, 397- 
400; State appropriation of, 401-427, 
514-515; taxes on, 406-419; effects of 
thus appropriating, 431-486. 

Reade, Winwood, Martyrdom of Man, 
478n, 479n. 

Religion, necessary to socialism, 318; 
promotive of civilization, 509, 519- 
520; Hebrew, effects on race, 495- 
496; retrogression in, 536-537; change 
going on, 540; animosities created by, 
507n; consensus of, 560-561. 

Ricardo, definition of capital, 33; in- 
ference as to population, 71 ; enunci- 
ation of law of rent, 168; narrow 
view of, 168-169, 225; tax on rent, 
420. 

Royce, Samuel, Deterioration and 
Race Education, 5S8n. 

Slaveholders of the South, their view 
of abolition, 351-353. 

Slavery, chattel, comparatively trivial 
effects of, 347; modifying influences, 
353-354; not truly abolished in 
United States, 355, 392; never aided 
progress, 522-523. 

Smith. Adam, definition of capital, 32- 
33, 36-42, 44, 45-46; recognizes truth 
as to source of wages and then 
abandons it, 50; influence of Malthu- 
sian theory upon, 92; profits, 157; 
how economists have followed him, 
159; differences of wages in different 
occupations, 207-208, 209-210; his 
failure to appreciate the laws of dis- 
tribution, 215; taxation, 416-419. 

Socialism, its ends and means, 317-319; 
practical realization of its ideal, 
431-469. 

Social organization and life, possible 
changes, 452-469. 

Spencer, Herbert, compensation of 
land owners, 357-358, 362; public 
ownership of land, 402; evolution, 
478, 485; human progress, 478-479; 
social differences, 502. 

Strikes, 310-314. 

Subsistence, population and, 91-150; 
increases with population, 129-133; 
cannot be exhausted, 133-134; in- 
cluded in wealth, 142, 244; demand 
for not fixed, 245-246. (See Malthu- 
sian Theory.) 

Supply and demand, of labor, 208-209; 
relative terms, 266-267; as affected 
by wages, 308-310. 

Swift, Dean, his Modest Proposal, 126. 



Taxation, eliminated in considering 
distribution, 155; reduction of will 
not relieve poverty, 297-301; con- 
sidered, 406-427; canons of, 406; 
effect upon production, 406-412; 
ease and cheapness in collection, 
412-414; certainty, 414-416; equality 
of, 416-119; opinions on, 420-423; 
objections to tax on rent, 422-427; 
cause of manifold taxation, 425-427; 
how taxation falls on agriculturists, 
447-450; effects of confiscating rent 
by taxation, 431-469. 
Tennant, Rev. Wm., cause of famine 

in India, 115-116. 
Thornton, Wm., on wage fund, 18w; 

on capital, 35. 
Values, equation of, 196-197. 
Wages, current doctrine, 17; it coin- 
cides with vulgar opinion, 18; but is 
inconsistent with facts, 19-22; genesis 
of current theory, 22; difference 
between it and that herein advanced, 
23-25; not drawn from capital but 
produced by labor, 23, 25-29, 49-69; 
meaning of the terrn, 31-32; always 
subsequent to labor, 56-58; fallacy 
of the assumption that they are 
drawn from capital, 56-57; for serv- 
ices, 59n; connection between cur- 
rent doctrine and Malthusian theory, 
92-95, 96-97; confusion of terms pro- 
duced by current theory, 159; rate 
of, 204; law of, 204-216; formulated, 
213; in different occupations, 207- 
212; as quantity and as proportion, 
216; not increased by material prog- 
ress, 303-304; minimum fixed by 
standard of comfort, 303; effect of 
increase or decrease on employers, 
308-309; equilibrium of, 310-311; not 
increased by division of land, 323- 
325; why they tend to wages of 
slavery, 346; efficiency of labor in- 
creases with, 442. 
Wages and Interest, high or low to- 
gether, 19-22; current explanation, 
19; Cairne's explanation, 20-22; 
true explanation, 170-172, 199-203, 
221; formulated, 218. 
Wages of Superintendence, 159; used 

to include profits of monopoly, 191. 
Walker, Amasa, capital, 35. 
Walker, Prof. F. A., wages, 18n; 

capital, 35. 
Wayland, Professor, definition of 

capital, 34. 
Wealth, increase of not generally 
shared, 8-9; meaning of term, 38- 
40; interchangeability of, 47-48, 142, 
181-182, 244-247; confounded with 
money, 60-61 ; increases with popu- 
lation, 141-150; accumulated, 147-149; 
laws of distribution, 153-216; formu- 
lated, 218; nature of, 147-149, 180, 
205; political effects of unequal dis- 
tribution, 300, 527-535; effects of 
just distribution, 438-444, 450-451, 
452-465. 



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